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Online conversations can go in many directions: some turn out poorly due to antisocial behavior, while others turn out positively to the benefit of all. Research on improving online spaces has focused primarily on detecting and reducing antisocial behavior. Yet we know little about positive outcomes in online conversations and how to increase them—is a prosocial outcome simply the lack of antisocial behavior or something more? Here, we examine how conversational features lead to prosocial outcomes within online discussions. We introduce a series of new theory-inspired metrics to define prosocial outcomes such as mentoring and esteem enhancement. Using a corpus of 26M Reddit conversations, we show that these outcomes can be forecasted from the initial comment of an online conversation, with the best model providing a relative 24% improvement over human forecasting performance at ranking conversations for predicted outcome. Our results indicate that platforms can use these early cues in their algorithmic ranking of early conversations to prioritize better outcomes

IJCNLP-AACL 2021

Conversations Gone Alright: Quantifying and Predicting Prosocial Outcomes in Online Conversations

toxic language

politeness

antisocial behavior

prosocial behavior

social support

reddit

hate speech

social media

**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).

**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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The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

workshop paper

We present a new method SOLOIST that uses transfer learning and machine teaching to build task bots at scale. We parameterize classical modular task-oriented dialog systems using a Transformer-based auto-regressive language model, which subsumes different dialog modules into a single neural model. We pre-train, on heterogeneous dialog corpora, a task-grounded response generation model, which can generate dialog responses grounded in user goals and real-world knowledge for task completion. The pre-trained model can be efficiently adapted to accomplish new tasks with a handful of task-specific dialogs via machine teaching, where training samples are generated by human teachers interacting with the system. Experiments show that (i) SOLOIST creates new state-of-the-art on well-studied task-oriented dialog benchmarks, including CamRest676 and MultiWOZ; (ii) in the few-shot fine-tuning settings, SOLOIST significantly outperforms existing methods, and (iii) the use of machine teaching substantially reduces the labeling cost of fine-tuning. The pre-trained models and codes are available at https://aka.ms/soloist.

SOLOIST: Building Task Bots at Scale with Transfer Learning and Machine Teaching

Retrieval is a core component for open-domain NLP tasks. In open-domain tasks, multiple entities can share a name, making disambiguation an inherent yet under-explored problem. We propose an evaluation benchmark for assessing the entity disambiguation capabilities of these retrievers, which we call Ambiguous Entity Retrieval (AmbER) sets. We define an AmbER set as a collection of entities that share a name along with queries about those entities. By covering the set of entities for polysemous names, AmbER sets act as a challenging test of entity disambiguation. We create AmbER sets for three popular open-domain tasks: fact checking, slot filling, and question answering, and evaluate a diverse set of retrievers. We find that the retrievers exhibit popularity bias, significantly under-performing on rarer entities that share a name, e.g., they are twice as likely to retrieve erroneous documents on queries for the less popular entity under the same name. These experiments on AmbER sets show their utility as an evaluation tool and highlight the weaknesses of popular retrieval systems.

Evaluating Entity Disambiguation and the Role of Popularity in Retrieval-Based NLP

With more than 7000 languages worldwide, multilingual natural language rocessing (NLP) is essential both from an academic and commercial perspective. Researching 
typological properties of languages is fundamental for progress in multilingual NLP. Examples include assessing language similarity for effective transfer learning, 
injecting inductive biases into machine learning models or creating resources such as dictionaries and inflection tables. We provide ParCourE, an online tool that allows to browse a word-aligned parallel corpus, covering 1334 languages. We give evidence that this is useful for typological research. ParCourE can be set up for any
parallel corpus and can thus be used for typological research on other corpora as well as for exploring their quality and properties.

ParCourE: A Parallel Corpus Explorer for a Massively Multilingual Corpus

We present MT-Telescope, a visualization platform designed to facilitate comparative analysis of the output quality of two Machine Translation (MT) systems. While automated MT evaluation metrics are commonly used to evaluate MT systems at a corpus level, our platform supports fine-grained segment-level analysis and interactive visualizations that expose the fundamental differences in the performance of the compared systems. MT-Telescope also supports dynamic corpus filtering to enable focused analysis on specific phenomena such as; translation of named entities, handling of terminology, and the impact of input segment length on translation quality. Furthermore, the platform provides a bootstrapped t-test for statistical significance as a means of evaluating the rigor of the resulting system ranking. MT-Telescope is open source, written in Python, and is built around a user-friendly and dynamic web interface. Complementing other existing tools, our platform is designed to facilitate and promote the broader adoption of more rigorous analysis practices in the evaluation of MT quality.

{MT}-{T}elescope: {A}n interactive platform for contrastive evaluation of {MT} systems

Health professional regulators aim to protect the health and well-being of patients and the public by setting standards for scrutinising and overseeing the training and conduct of health and care professionals. A major task of such regulators is the investigation of complaints against practitioners. However, processing a complaint often lasts several months and is particularly costly. Hence, we worked with international regulators from different countries(the UK, US and Australia), to develop the first decision support tool that aims to help such regulators process complaints more efficiently. Our system uses state-of-the-art machine learning and natural language processing techniques to process complaints and predict their risk level. Our tool also provides additional useful information including explanations, to help the regulatory staff interpret the prediction results, and similar past cases as well as non-compliance to regulations, to support the decision making.

Supporting Complaints Investigation for Nursing and Midwifery Regulatory Agencies

CogNet is a knowledge base that integrates three types of knowledge: linguistic knowledge, world knowledge and commonsense knowledge. In this paper, we propose an information extraction toolkit, called CogIE, which is a bridge connecting raw texts and CogNet. CogIE has three features: versatile, knowledge-grounded and extensible. First, CogIE is a versatile toolkit with a rich set of functional modules, including named entity recognition, entity typing, entity linking, relation extraction, event extraction and frame-semantic parsing. Second, as a knowledge-grounded toolkit, CogIE can ground the extracted facts to CogNet and leverage different types of knowledge to enrich extracted results. Third, for extensibility, owing to the design of three-tier architecture, CogIE is not only a plug-and-play toolkit for developers but also an extensible programming framework for researchers. We release an open-access online system to visually extract information from texts. Source code, datasets and pre-trained models are publicly available at GitHub, with a short instruction video.

CogIE: An Information Extraction Toolkit for Bridging Texts and CogNet

We introduce the first study of automatic detoxification of Russian texts to combat offensive language. Such a kind of textual style transfer can be used, for instance, for processing toxic content in social media. While much work has been done for the English language in this field, it has never been solved for the Russian language yet. We test two types of models -- unsupervised approach based on BERT architecture that performs local corrections and supervised approach based on pretrained language GPT-2 model -- and compare them with several baselines. In addition, we describe evaluation setup providing training datasets and metrics for automatic evaluation. The results show that the tested approaches can be successfully used for detoxification, although there is room for improvement.

Methods for Detoxification of Texts for the Russian Language

The range of works that can be considered as developing NLP for social good (NLP4SG) is enormous. While many of them target the identification of hate speech or fake news, there are others that address, e.g., text simplification to alleviate consequences of dyslexia, or coaching strategies to fight depression. However, so far, there is no clear picture of what areas are targeted by NLP4SG, who are the actors, which are the main scenarios and what are the topics that have been left aside. In order to obtain a clearer view in this respect, we first propose a working definition of NLP4SG and identify some primary aspects that are crucial for NLP4SG, including, e.g., tackled areas, ethics, privacy and bias. Then, we draw upon a corpus of around 50,000 articles downloaded from the ACL Anthology. Based on a list of keywords retrieved from the literature and revised in view of the task, we retrieve from this corpus articles that can be considered to be on NLP4SG according to our definition and analyze them. The result of the analysis is a map of the current NLP4SG research and insights concerning the white spots on this map.

Cartography of Natural Language Processing for Social Good (NLP4SG): Searching for Definitions, Statistics and White Spots

We introduce 9 guiding principles to integrate Participatory Design (PD) methods in the development of Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems. The adoption of PD methods by NLP will help to alleviate issues concerning the development of more democratic, fairer, less-biased technologies to process natural lan- guage data. This short paper is the outcome of an ongoing dialogue between designers and NLP experts and adopts a non-standard format following previous work by Traum (2000); Bender (2013); Abzianidze and Bos (2019). Every section is a guiding principle. While principles 1–3 illustrate assumptions and methods that inform community-based PD practices, we used two fictional design scenarios (Encinas and Blythe, 2018), which build on top of situations familiar to the authors, to elicit the identification of the other 6. Prin- ciples 4–6 describe the impact of PD methods on the design of NLP systems, targeting two critical aspects: data collection & annota- tion, and the deployment & evaluation. Finally, principles 7–9 guide a new reflexivity of the NLP research with respect to its context, ac- tors and participants, and aims. We hope this guide will offer inspiration and a road-map to develop a new generation of PD-inspired NLP.

Guiding Principles for Participatory Design-inspired Natural Language Processing

In this overview article we describe an application designed to enable communication between health practitioners and patients who do not share a common language, in situations where professional interpreters are not available. Built on the principle of a fixed phrase translator, the application implements different natural language processing (NLP) technologies, such as speech recognition, neural machine translation and text-to-speech to improve usability. Its design allows easy portability to new domains and integration of different types of output for multiple target audiences. Even though BabelDr is far from solving the problem of miscommunication between patients and doctors, it is a clear example of NLP in a real world application designed to help minority groups to communicate in a medical context. It also gives some insights into the relevant criteria for the development of such an application.

Conversations Gone Alright: Quantifying and Predicting Prosocial Outcomes in Online Conversations

Next from IJCNLP-AACL 2021

SOLOIST: Building Task Bots at Scale with Transfer Learning and Machine Teaching

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