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Recent years have seen many breakthroughs in natural language processing (NLP), transitioning it from a mostly theoretical field to one with many real-world applications. Noting the rising number of applications of other machine learning and AI techniques with pervasive societal impact, we anticipate the rising importance of developing NLP technologies for social good. Inspired by theories in moral philosophy and global priorities research, we aim to promote a guideline for social good in the context of NLP. We lay the foundations via moral philosophy&#39;s definition of social good, propose a framework to evaluate NLP tasks&#39; direct and indirect real-world impact, and adopt the methodology of global priorities research to identify priority causes for NLP research. Finally, we use our theoretical framework to provide some practical guidelines for future NLP research for social good. Our data and codes are available at http://github.com/zhijing-jin/nlp4sg_acl2021

ACL 2021

How Good Is NLP? A Sober Look at NLP Tasks through the Lens of Social Impact

social impact

social engagement

research agenda

moral philosophy

nlp for social good

applications

checklist

social good

ethics

**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

Registration is now open

Recent years have seen many breakthroughs in natural language processing (NLP), transitioning it from a mostly theoretical field to one with many real-world applications. Noting the rising number of applications of other machine learning and AI techniques with pervasive societal impact, we anticipate the rising importance of developing NLP technologies for social good. Inspired by theories in moral philosophy and global priorities research, we aim to promote a guideline for social good in the context of NLP. We lay the foundations via moral philosophy's definition of social good, propose a framework to evaluate NLP tasks' direct and indirect real-world impact, and adopt the methodology of global priorities research to identify priority causes for NLP research. Finally, we use our theoretical framework to provide some practical guidelines for future NLP research for social good. Our data and codes are available at http://github.com/zhijing-jin/nlp4sg_acl2021

workshop paper

In the era of pre-trained language models, Transformers are the de facto choice of model architectures. While recent research has shown promise in entirely convolutional, or CNN, architectures, they have not been explored using the pre-train-fine-tune paradigm. In the context of language models, are convolutional models competitive to Transformers when pre-trained? This paper investigates this research question and presents several interesting findings. Across an extensive set of experiments on 8 datasets/tasks, we find that CNN-based pre-trained models are competitive and outperform their Transformer counterpart in certain scenarios, albeit with caveats. Overall, the findings outlined in this paper suggest that conflating pre-training and architectural advances is misguided and that both advances should be considered independently. We believe our research paves the way for a healthy amount of optimism in alternative architectures.

Are Pretrained Convolutions Better than Pretrained Transformers?

Pre-trained text-to-text transformers such as BART have achieved impressive performance across a range of NLP tasks. Recent study further shows that they can learn to generalize to novel tasks, by including task descriptions as part of the source sequence and training the model with (source, target) examples. At test time, these fine-tuned models can make inferences on new tasks using the new task descriptions as part of the input. However, this approach has potential limitations, as the model learns to solve individual (source, target) examples (i.e., at the instance level), instead of learning to solve tasks by taking all examples within a task as a whole (i.e., at the task level). To this end, we introduce Hypter, a framework that improves text-to-text transformer's generalization ability to unseen tasks by training a hypernetwork to generate task-specific, light-weight adapters from task descriptions. Experiments on ZEST dataset and a synthetic SQuAD dataset demonstrate that Hypter improves upon fine-tuning baselines. Notably, when using BART-Large as the main network, Hypter brings 11.3% comparative improvement on ZEST dataset.

Learning to Generate Task-Specific Adapters from Task Description

Hierarchical text classification is an important yet challenging task due to the complex structure of the label hierarchy. Existing methods ignore the semantic relationship between text and labels, so they cannot make full use of the hierarchical information. To this end, we formulate the text-label semantics relationship as a semantic matching problem and thus propose a hierarchy-aware label semantics matching network (HiMatch). First, we project text semantics and label semantics into a joint embedding space. We then introduce a joint embedding loss and a matching learning loss to model the matching relationship between the text semantics and the label semantics. Our model captures the text-label semantics matching relationship among coarse-grained labels and fine-grained labels in a hierarchy-aware manner. The experimental results on various benchmark datasets verify that our model achieves state-of-the-art results.

Hierarchy-aware Label Semantics Matching Network for Hierarchical Text Classification

Fine-tuning large pre-trained models with task-specific data has achieved great success in NLP. However, it has been demonstrated that the majority of information within the self-attention networks is redundant and not utilized effectively during the fine-tuning stage. This leads to inferior results when generalizing the obtained models to out-of-domain distributions. To this end, we propose a simple yet effective data augmentation technique, HiddenCut, to better regularize the model and encourage it to learn more generalizable features. Specifically, contiguous spans within the hidden space are dynamically and strategically dropped during training. Experiments show that our HiddenCut method outperforms the state-of-the-art augmentation methods on the GLUE benchmark, and consistently exhibits superior generalization performances on out-of-distribution and challenging counterexamples. We have publicly released our code at https://github.com/GT-SALT/HiddenCut.

HiddenCut: Simple Data Augmentation for Natural Language Understanding with Better Generalizability

A key challenge in human-machine communication is expressing one's intent using precise programmatic concepts. 
This process can be unintuitive, as users are forced to adapt to the idiosyncratic expressions chosen by the system architect. 
We suggest an \emph{adaptive alignment} approach that allows a system to gradually align its representation of underlying programmatic concepts, expressed in program transformations, with the conventions used by a community of users to express concepts in natural language.
Specifically, we cast the problem of alignment as an online inference problem, aiming to recover the ground-truth conventions shared within a community of users from a dataset of interactions with users. 
We present a series of simulations and an interactive user study using a subset of the \texttt{matplotlib} domain. 
We find that a community of users can quickly ``naturalize'' the obscure underlying programmatic transformations, allowing subsequent users to use the system more efficiently.

Community Driven Alignment of Natural and Programming Languages

A great part of software development involves conceptualizing or communicating the underlying procedures and logic that needs to be expressed in programs. One major difficulty of programming is turning concept into code, especially when dealing with the APIs of unfamiliar libraries. Recently, there has been a proliferation of machine learning methods for code generation and retrieval from natural language queries, but these have primarily been evaluated purely based on retrieval accuracy or overlap of generated code with developer written code, and the actual effect of these methods on the developer workflow is surprisingly unattested. In this paper, we perform the first comprehensive investigation of the promise and challenges of using such technology inside the PyCharm IDE, asking “at the current state of technology does it improve developer productivity or accuracy, how does it affect the developer experience, and what are the remaining gaps and challenges?” To facilitate the study, we first develop a plugin for the PyCharm IDE that implements a hybrid of code generation and code retrieval functionality, and orchestrate virtual environments to enable collection of many user events (e.g. web browsing, keystrokes, fine-grained code edits). We ask developers with various backgrounds to complete 7 varieties of 14 Python programming tasks ranging from basic file manipulation to machine learning or data visualization, with or without the help of the plugin. While qualitative surveys of developer experience are largely positive, quantitative results with regards to increased productivity, code
quality, or program correctness are inconclusive. Further analysis identifies several pain points that could
improve the effectiveness of future machine learning based code generation/retrieval developer assistants, and demonstrates when developers prefer code generation over code retrieval and vice versa. We release all data and software to pave the road for future empirical studies on this topic, as well as development of better code generation models.

In-IDE Code Generation from Natural Language: Promise and Challenges

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

Conversational Agents (CAs) can be a proxy for disseminating information and providing support to the public, especially in times of crisis. CAs can scale to reach larger numbers of end-users than human operators, while they can offer information interactively and engagingly. In this work, we present Theano, a Greek-speaking virtual assistant for COVID-19. Theano presents users with COVID-19 statistics and facts and informs users about the best health practices as well as the latest COVID-19 related guidelines. Additionally, Theano provides support to end-users by helping them self-assess their symptoms and redirecting them to first-line health workers. The relevant, localized information that Theano provides, makes it a valuable tool for combating COVID-19 in Greece. Theano has already conversed with different users in more than 170 different conversations through a web interface as a chatbot and over the phone as a voice bot.

Theano: A Greek-speaking conversational agent for COVID-19

In this position paper, we present a research agenda and ideas for facilitating exposure to diverse viewpoints in news recommendation. Recommending news from diverse viewpoints is important to prevent potential filter bubble effects in news consumption, and stimulate a healthy democratic debate.
To account for the complexity that is inherent to humans as citizens in a democracy, we anticipate (among others) individual-level differences in acceptance of diversity. We connect this idea to techniques in Natural Language Processing, where distributional language models would allow us to place different users and news articles in a multidimensional space based on semantic content, where diversity is operationalized as distance and variance. In this way, we can model individual ''latitudes of diversity" for different users, and thus personalize viewpoint diversity in support of a healthy public debate. In addition, we identify technical, ethical and conceptual issues related to our presented ideas. Our investigation describes how NLP can play a central role in diversifying news recommendations.

Are we human, or are we users? The role of natural language processing in human-centric news recommenders that nudge users to diverse content

Online shopping is an ever more important part of the global consumer economy, not just in times of a pandemic. When we place an order online as consumers, we regularly agree to the so-called "Terms and Conditions" (T&C), a contract unilaterally drafted by the seller. Often, consumers do not read these contracts and unwittingly agree to unfavourable and often void terms. Government and non-government organisations (NGOs) for consumer protection battle such terms on behalf of consumers, who often hesitate to take on legal actions themselves. However, the growing number of online shops and a lack of funding makes it increasingly difficult for such organisations to monitor the market effectively. We describe how Natural Language Processing (NLP) can be applied to support consumer advocates in their efforts to protect consumers. Together with two NGOs from Germany, we developed an NLP-based application that legally assesses clauses in T&C from German online shops under the European Union's (EU) jurisdiction. We report that we could achieve an accuracy of 0.9 in the detection of void clauses by fine-tuning a pre-trained German BERT model. The approach is currently used by two NGOs and has already helped to challenge void clauses in T&C.

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How Good Is NLP? A Sober Look at NLP Tasks through the Lens of Social Impact

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