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In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised opinion summarization framework TransSum, which models opinion summaries as translations operating on the low-dimensional aspect and sentiment embedding spaces. Specifically, we propose two contrastive objectives to learn the crucial aspect and sentiment embeddings of reviews, by taking advantage of the intra- and inter-group invariances that have not been considered in previous studies.
Furthermore, these embeddings can be used to reduce opinion redundancy and construct highly relevant reviews-summary pairs to train a supervised multi-input opinion summarization model.
Experimental results on three different domains show that TransSum outperforms several strong baselines in generating informative, relevant and low-redundant summaries, unveiling the effectiveness of our approach.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

TransSum: Translating Aspect and Sentiment Embeddings for Self-Supervised Opinion Summarization

**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).

technical paper

Pre-trained multilingual language models, e.g., multilingual-BERT, are widely used in cross-lingual tasks, yielding the state-of-the-art performance. However, such models suffer from a large performance gap between source and target languages, especially in the zero-shot setting, where the models are fine-tuned only on English but tested on other languages for the same task. We tackle this issue by incorporating language-agnostic information, specifically, universal syntax such as dependency relations and POS tags, into language models, based on the observation that universal syntax is transferable across different languages. Our approach, called COunterfactual SYntax~(COSY), includes the design of SYntax-aware networks as well as a COunterfactual training method to implicitly force the networks to learn not only the semantics but also the syntax. To evaluate COSY, we conduct cross-lingual experiments on natural language inference and question answering using mBERT and XLM-R as network backbones. Our results show that COSY achieves the state-of-the-art performance for both tasks, without using auxiliary training data.

COSY: COunterfactual SYntax for Cross-Lingual Understanding

Recent studies on neural networks with pre-trained weights (i.e., BERT) have mainly focused on a low-dimensional subspace, where the embedding vectors computed from input words (or their contexts) are located. In this work, we propose a new approach, called OoMMix, to finding and regularizing the remainder of the space, referred to as out-of-manifold, which cannot be accessed through the words. Specifically, we synthesize the out-of-manifold embeddings based on two embeddings obtained from actually-observed words, to utilize them for fine-tuning the network. A discriminator is trained to detect whether an input embedding is located inside the manifold or not, and simultaneously, a generator is optimized to produce new embeddings that can be easily identified as out-of-manifold by the discriminator. These two modules successfully collaborate in a unified and end-to-end manner for regularizing the out-of-manifold. Our extensive evaluation on various text classification benchmarks demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach, as well as its good compatibility with existing data augmentation techniques which aim to enhance the manifold.

OoMMix: Out-of-manifold Regularization in Contextual Embedding Space for Text Classification

Existing approaches for the Table-to-Text task suffer from issues such as missing information, hallucination and repetition. Many approaches to this problem use Reinforcement Learning (RL), which maximizes a single manually defined reward, such as BLEU. In this work, we instead pose the Table-to-Text task as Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) problem. We explore using multiple interpretable unsupervised reward components that are combined linearly to form a composite reward function. The composite reward function and the description generator are learned jointly. We find that IRL outperforms strong RL baselines marginally. We further study the generalization of learned IRL rewards in scenarios involving domain adaptation. Our experiments reveal significant challenges in using IRL for this task.

How Helpful is Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Table-to-Text Generation?

Stereotypical language expresses widely-held beliefs about different social categories. Many stereotypes are overtly negative, while others may appear positive on the surface, but still lead to negative consequences. In this work, we present a computational approach to interpreting stereotypes in text through the Stereotype Content Model (SCM), a comprehensive causal theory from social psychology. The SCM proposes that stereotypes can be understood along two primary dimensions: warmth and competence. We present a method for defining warmth and competence axes in semantic embedding space, and show that the four quadrants defined by this subspace accurately represent the warmth and competence concepts, according to annotated lexicons. We then apply our computational SCM model to textual stereotype data and show that it compares favourably with survey-based studies in the psychological literature. Furthermore, we explore various strategies to counter stereotypical beliefs with anti-stereotypes. It is known that countering stereotypes with anti-stereotypical examples is one of the most effective ways to reduce biased thinking, yet the problem of generating anti-stereotypes has not been previously studied. Thus, a better understanding of how to generate realistic and effective anti-stereotypes can contribute to addressing pressing societal concerns of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination.

Understanding and Countering Stereotypes: A Computational Approach to the Stereotype Content Model

Misinformation has recently become a well-documented matter of public concern. Existing studies on this topic have hitherto adopted a coarse concept of misinformation, which incorporates a broad spectrum of story types ranging from political conspiracies to misinterpreted pranks. This paper aims to structurize these misinformation stories by leveraging fact-check articles. Our intuition is that key phrases in a fact-check article that identify the misinformation type(s) (e.g., doctored images, urban legends) also act as rationales that determine the verdict of the fact-check (e.g., false). We experiment on rationalized models with domain knowledge as weak supervision to extract these phrases as rationales, and then cluster semantically similar rationales to summarize prevalent misinformation types. Using archived fact-checks from Snopes.com, we identify ten types of misinformation stories. We discuss how these types have evolved over the last ten years and compare their prevalence between the 2016/2020 US presidential elections and the H1N1/COVID-19 pandemics.

Structurizing Misinformation Stories via Rationalizing Fact-Checks

People debate on a variety of topics on online platforms such as Reddit, or Facebook. Debates can be lengthy, with users exchanging a wealth of information and opinions. However, conversations do not always go smoothly, and users sometimes engage in unsound argumentation techniques to prove a claim. These techniques are called fallacies. Fallacies are persuasive arguments that provide insufficient or incorrect evidence to support the claim. In this paper, we study the most frequent fallacies on Reddit, and we present them using the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation. We construct a new annotated dataset of fallacies, using user comments containing fallacy mentions as noisy labels, and cleaning the data via crowdsourcing. Finally, we study the task of classifying fallacies using neural models. We find that generally the models perform better in the presence of conversational context.We have released the data and the code at github.com/sahaisaumya/informal_fallacies.

Breaking Down the Invisible Wall of Informal Fallacies in Online Discussions

Emotion cause analysis (ECA) has been an emerging topic in natural language processing, which aims to identify the reasons behind a certain emotion expressed in the text. Most ECA methods intend to identify the clause which contains the cause of a given emotion, but such clause-level ECA (CECA) can be ambiguous and imprecise. In this paper, we aim at span-level ECA (SECA) by detecting the precise boundaries of text spans conveying accurate emotion causes from the given context. We formulate this task as sequence labeling and position identification problems and design two neural methods to solve them. Experiments on two benchmark ECA datasets show that the proposed methods substantially outperform the existing ECA models.

Boundary Detection with BERT for Span-level Emotion Cause Analysis

In multi-hop QA, answering complex questions entails iterative document retrieval for finding the missing entity of the question. The main steps of this process are sub-question detection, document retrieval for the sub-question, and generation of a new query for the final document retrieval. However, building a dataset that contains complex questions with sub-questions and their corresponding documents requires costly human annotation. To address the issue, we propose a new method for weakly supervised multi-hop retriever pre-training without human efforts. Our method includes 1) a pre-training task for generating vector representations of complex questions, 2) a scalable data generation method that produces the nested structure of question and sub-question as weak supervision for pre-training, and 3) a pre-training model structure based on dense encoders. We conduct experiments to compare the performance of our pre-trained retriever with several state-of-the-art models on end-to-end multi-hop QA as well as document retrieval. The experimental results show that our pre-trained retriever is effective and also robust on limited data and computational resources.

Weakly Supervised Pre-Training for Multi-Hop Retriever

Existing rumor detection strategies typically provide detection labels while ignoring their explanation. Nonetheless, providing pieces of evidence to explain why a suspicious tweet is rumor is essential. As such, a novel model, LOSIRD, was proposed in this paper. First, LOSIRD mines appropriate evidence sentences and classifies them by automatically checking the veracity of the relationship of the given claim and its evidence from about 5 million Wikipedia documents. LOSIRD then automatically constructs two heterogeneous graph objects to simulate the propagation layout of the tweets and code the relationship of evidence. Finally, a graphSAGE processing component is used in LOSIRD to provide the label and evidence. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first one who combines objective facts and subjective views to verify rumor. The experimental results on two real-world Twitter datasets showed that our model exhibited the best performance in the early rumor detection task and its rumor detection performance outperformed other baseline and state-of-the-art models. Moreover, we confirmed that both objective information and subjective information are fundamental clues for rumor detection.

Meet The Truth: Leverage Objective Facts and Subjective Views for Interpretable Rumor Detection

Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) aims to detect and correct erroneous characters for user-generated text in the Chinese language. 
Most of the Chinese spelling errors are misused semantically, phonetically or graphically similar characters. 
Previous attempts noticed this phenomenon and try to use the similarity for this task. However, these methods use either heuristics or handcrafted confusion sets to predict the correct character. In this paper, we propose a Chinese spell checker called ReaLiSe, by directly leveraging the multimodal information of the Chinese characters. 
The ReaLiSe model tackles the CSC task by (1) capturing the semantic, phonetic and graphic information of the input characters, and (2) selectively mixing the information in these modalities to predict the correct output. Experiments on the SIGHAN benchmarks show that the proposed model outperforms strong baselines by a large margin.

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