Thailand

Automatic socio-political and crisis event detection has been a challenge for natural language processing as well as social and political science communities, due to the diversity and nuance in such events and high accuracy requirements. In this paper, we propose an approach which can handle both document and cross-sentence level event detection in a multilingual setting using pretrained transformer models. Our approach became the winning solution in document level predictions and secured the 3rd place in cross-sentence level predictions for the English language. We could also achieve competitive results for other languages to prove the effectiveness and universality of our approach.

ACL 2021

DAAI at CASE 2021 Task 1: Transformer-based Multilingual Socio-political and Crisis Event Detection

news media

event detection

transformers

**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.

**Reminder2:** Underline site will open closer to the event. If you already registered you will receive access detail

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workshop paper

There are two major classes of natural language grammars --- the dependency grammar that models one-to-one correspondences between words and the constituency grammar that models the assembly of one or several corresponded words. While previous unsupervised parsing methods mostly focus on only inducing one class of grammars, we introduce a novel model, StructFormer, that can induce dependency and constituency structure at the same time. To achieve this, we propose a new parsing framework that can jointly generate a constituency tree and dependency graph. Then we integrate the induced dependency relations into the transformer, in a differentiable manner, through a novel dependency-constrained self-attention mechanism. Experimental results show that our model can achieve strong results on unsupervised constituency parsing, unsupervised dependency parsing, and masked language modeling at the same time.

StructFormer: Joint Unsupervised Induction of Dependency and Constituency Structure from Masked Language Modeling

Søgaard (2020) obtained results suggesting the fraction of trees occurring in the test data isomorphic to trees in the training set accounts for a non-trivial variation in parser performance. Similar to other statistical analyses in NLP, the results were based on evaluating linear regressions. However, the study had methodological issues and was undertaken using a small sample size leading to unreliable results. We present a replication study in which we also bin sentences by length and find that only a small subset of sentences vary in performance with respect to graph isomorphism. Further, the correlation observed between parser performance and graph isomorphism in the wild disappears when controlling for covariants. However, in a controlled experiment, where covariants are kept fixed, we do observe a correlation. We suggest that conclusions drawn from statistical analyses like this need to be tempered and that controlled experiments can complement them by more readily teasing factors apart.

Replicating and Extending ``Because Their Treebanks Leak'': Graph Isomorphism, Covariants, and Parser Performance

Cross-lingual language tasks typically require a substantial amount of annotated data or parallel translation data. We explore whether language representations that capture relationships among languages can be learned and subsequently leveraged in cross-lingual tasks without the use of parallel data. We generate dense embeddings for 29 languages using a denoising autoencoder, and evaluate the embeddings using the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) and two extrinsic tasks in a zero-shot setting: cross-lingual dependency parsing and cross-lingual natural language inference.

Language Embeddings for Typology and Cross-lingual Transfer Learning

The growing ecosystem of data sharing in science has put dataset search into the focus. To make data sharing and reuse more feasible, new retrieval tools and services are being developed. Currently, dataset retrieval relies almost exclusively on metadata provided by the publishers. To extend this knowledge source our work studies the task of ``dataset review mining'' in scientific publications. For the field of Natural Language Processing we collect metadata about datasets from established resources such as the ELRA and LDC catalogs, and then extract review statements about the datasets from ACL Anthology Corpus publications, compiling the Webis-Dataset-Reviews-21 corpus. By analyzing the reviews we identify different categories of what paper authors write about data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first analysis of this kind in the field of Natural Language Processing, albeit similar analyses have been carried out in the social and medical sciences. Our corpus and the underlying code are shared alongside this paper.

Beyond Metadata: What Paper Authors Say About Corpora They Use

Quality Estimation (QE) is the task of automatically predicting Machine Translation quality in the absence of reference translations, making it applicable in real-time settings, such as translating online social media conversations. Recent success in QE stems from the use of multilingual pre-trained representations, where very large models lead to impressive results. However, the inference time, disk and memory requirements of such models do not allow for wide usage in the real world. Models trained on distilled pre-trained representations remain prohibitively large for many usage scenarios. We instead propose to directly transfer knowledge from a strong QE teacher model to a much smaller model with a different, shallower architecture. We show that this approach, in combination with data augmentation, leads to light-weight QE models that perform competitively with distilled pre-trained representations with 8x fewer parameters.

Knowledge Distillation for Quality Estimation

In this paper, we aim to improve abstractive dialogue summarization quality and, at the same time, enable granularity control. Our model has two primary components and stages: 1) a two-stage generation strategy that generates a preliminary summary sketch serving as the basis for the final summary. This summary sketch provides a weakly supervised signal in the form of pseudo-labeled interrogative pronoun categories and key phrases extracted using a constituency parser. 2) A simple strategy to control the granularity of the final summary, in that our model can automatically determine or control the number of generated summary sentences for a given dialogue by predicting and highlighting different text spans from the source text. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the largest dialogue summarization corpus SAMSum, with as high as 50.79 in ROUGE-L score. In addition, we conduct a case study and show competitive human evaluation results and controllability to human-annotated summaries.

Controllable Abstractive Dialogue Summarization with Sketch Supervision

We apply statistical techniques from natural language processing to a collection of Western and Hong Kong–based English-language newspaper articles spanning the years 1998–2020, studying the difference and evolution of its portrayal. We observe that both content and attitudes differ between Western and Hong Kong–based sources. 
ANOVA on keyword frequencies reveals that Hong Kong–based papers discuss protests and democracy less often.
Topic modeling detects salient aspects of protests and shows that Hong Kong–based papers made fewer references to police violence during the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement.
Diachronic shifts in word embedding neighborhoods reveal a shift in the characterization of salient keywords once the Movement emerged.
Together, these raise questions about the existence of anodyne reporting from Hong Kong–based media.
Likewise, they illustrate the importance of sample selection for protest event analysis.

Characterizing News Portrayal of Civil Unrest in Hong Kong, 1998–2020

Most of the existing information extraction frameworks (Wadden et al., 2019; Veysehet al., 2020) focus on sentence-level tasks and are hardly able to capture the consolidated information from a given document. In our endeavour to generate precise document-level information frames from lengthy textual records, we introduce the task of Information Aggregation or Argument Aggregation. More specifically, our aim is to filter irrelevant and redundant argument mentions that were extracted at a sentence level and render a document level information frame. Majority of the existing works have been observed to resolve related tasks of document-level event argument extraction (Yang et al., 2018a; Zheng et al., 2019a) and salient entity identification (Jain et al.,2020) using supervised techniques. To remove dependency from large amounts of labelled data, we explore the task of information aggregation using weakly-supervised techniques. In particular, we present an extractive algorithm with multiple sieves which adopts active learning strategies to work efficiently in low-resource settings. For this task, we have annotated our own test dataset comprising of 131 document information frames and have released the code and dataset to further research prospects in this new domain. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to establish baseline results for this task in English. Our data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/DebanjanaKar/ArgFuse

ArgFuse: A Weakly-Supervised Framework for Document-Level Event Argument Aggregation

We present our submission to Task 2 of the Socio-political and Crisis Events Detection Shared Task at the CASE @ ACL-IJCNLP 2021 workshop. The task at hand aims at the fine-grained classification of socio-political events. Our best model was a fine-tuned RoBERTa transformer model using document embeddings. The corpus consisted of a balanced selection of sub-events extracted from the ACLED event dataset. We achieved a macro F-score of 0.923 and a micro F-score of 0.932 during our preliminary experiments on a held-out test set. The same model also
performed best on the shared task test data (weighted F-score = 0.83). To analyze the results we calculated the topic compactness of the commonly misclassified events and conducted an error analysis.

Socio political Fine grained Event Classification using Fine tuned RoBERTa Document Embeddings

We present our approaches for event detection in articles and sentences based on simple densely connected neural networks, as well as a solution for event sentence co-reference resolution, as part of task 1 of the Shared Task on Socio-Political and Crisis Events Detection CASE @ ACL-IJCNLP 2021. The first task is split up into four different subtasks, we participated in three of them.

DAAI at CASE 2021 Task 1: Transformer-based Multilingual Socio-political and Crisis Event Detection

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DAAI at CASE 2021 Task 1: Transformer-based Multilingual Socio-political and Crisis Event Detection

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Next from ACL 2021

StructFormer: Joint Unsupervised Induction of Dependency and Constituency Structure from Masked Language Modeling

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On the Interplay Between Fine-tuning and Composition in Transformers

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads