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Amidst rising mental health needs in society, virtual agents are increasingly deployed in counselling. In order to give pertinent advice, counsellors must first gain an understanding of the issues at hand by eliciting sharing from the counsellee. It is thus important for the counsellor chatbot to encourage the user to open up and talk. One way to sustain the conversation flow is to acknowledge the counsellee&#39;s key points by restating them, or probing them further with questions. This paper applies models from two closely related NLP tasks --- summarization and question generation --- to restatement and question generation in the counselling context. We conducted experiments on a manually annotated dataset of Cantonese post-reply pairs on topics related to loneliness, academic anxiety and test anxiety. We obtained the best performance in both restatement and question generation by fine-tuning BertSum, a state-of-the-art summarization model, with the in-domain manual dataset augmented with a large-scale, automatically mined open-domain dataset.

IJCNLP-AACL 2021

Restatement and Question Generation for Counsellor Chatbot

counselling; chatbot; 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.


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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).

Amidst rising mental health needs in society, virtual agents are increasingly deployed in counselling. In order to give pertinent advice, counsellors must first gain an understanding of the issues at hand by eliciting sharing from the counsellee. It is thus important for the counsellor chatbot to encourage the user to open up and talk. One way to sustain the conversation flow is to acknowledge the counsellee's key points by restating them, or probing them further with questions. This paper applies models from two closely related NLP tasks --- summarization and question generation --- to restatement and question generation in the counselling context. We conducted experiments on a manually annotated dataset of Cantonese post-reply pairs on topics related to loneliness, academic anxiety and test anxiety. We obtained the best performance in both restatement and question generation by fine-tuning BertSum, a state-of-the-art summarization model, with the in-domain manual dataset augmented with a large-scale, automatically mined open-domain dataset.

workshop paper

In this work, we introduce \datasetName: the largest publicly available multilingual dataset for factual verification of naturally existing real-world claims. The dataset contains short statements in 25 languages and is labeled for veracity by expert fact-checkers. The dataset includes a multilingual evaluation benchmark that measures both out-of-domain generalization, and zero-shot capabilities of the multilingual models. Using state-of-the-art multilingual transformer-based models, we develop several automated fact-checking models that, along with textual claims, make use of additional metadata and evidence from news stories retrieved using a search engine. Empirically, our best model attains an F-score of around 40%, suggesting that our dataset is a challenging benchmark for the evaluation of multilingual fact-checking models.

X-Fact: A New Benchmark Dataset for Multilingual Fact Checking

While pre-training techniques are working very well in natural language processing, how to pre-train a decoder and effectively use it for neural machine translation (NMT) still remains a tricky issue. The main reason is that the cross-attention module between the encoder and decoder cannot be pre-trained, and the combined encoder-decoder model cannot work well in the fine-tuning stage because the inputs of the decoder cross-attention come from unknown encoder outputs. In this paper, we propose a better pre-training method for NMT by defining a semantic interface (SemFace) between the pre-trained encoder and the pre-trained decoder. Specifically, we propose two types of semantic interfaces, including CL-SemFace which regards cross-lingual embeddings as an interface, and VQ-SemFace which employs vector quantized embeddings to constrain the encoder outputs and decoder inputs in the same language-independent space. We conduct massive experiments on six supervised translation pairs and three unsupervised pairs. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed SemFace can effectively connect the pre-trained encoder and decoder, and achieves significant improvement by 3.7 and 1.5 BLEU points on the two tasks respectively compared with previous pre-training-based NMT models.

SemFace: Pre-training Encoder and Decoder with a Semantic Interface for Neural Machine Translation

The discrepancy between maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) and task measures such as BLEU score has been studied before for autoregressive neural machine translation (NMT) and resulted in alternative training algorithms (Ranzato et al., 2016; Norouzi et al., 2016; Shen et al., 2016; Wu et al., 2018). However, MLE training remains the de facto approach for autoregressive NMT because of its computational efficiency and stability. 
Despite this mismatch between the training objective and task measure, we notice that the samples drawn from an MLE-based trained NMT support the desired distribution -- there are samples with much higher BLEU score comparing to the beam decoding output. To benefit from this observation, we train an energy-based model to mimic the behavior of the task measure (i.e., the energy-based model assigns lower energy to samples with higher BLEU score), which is resulted in a re-ranking algorithm based on the samples drawn from NMT: energy-based re-ranking (EBR). We use both marginal energy models (over target sentence) and joint energy models (over both source and target sentences). Our EBR with the joint energy model consistently improves the performance of the Transformer-based NMT: +3.7 BLEU points on IWSLT'14 German-English, +3.37 BELU points on Sinhala-English, +1.4 BLEU points on WMT'16 English-German tasks.

Energy-Based Reranking: Improving Neural Machine Translation Using Energy-Based Models

This paper presents REM, a novel tool for the semi-automated real-time moderation of large scale online forums. The growing demand for online participation and the increasing number of user comments  raise challenges in filtering out harmful and undesirable content from public debates in online forums. Since a manual moderation does not scale well and pure automated approaches often lack the required level of accuracy, we suggest a semi-automated moderation approach. Our approach maximizes the efficiency of manual efforts by targeting only those comments for which human intervention is needed, e.g. due to high classification uncertainty.  Our tool offers a rich visual interactive environment enabling the exploration of online debates.  We conduct a preliminary evaluation experiment to demonstrate the suitability of our approach and publicly release the source code of REM.

REM: Efficient Semi-Automated Real-Time Moderation of Online Forums

Scientific knowledge is evolving at an unprecedented rate of speed, with new concepts constantly being introduced from millions of academic articles published every month. In this paper, we introduce a self-supervised end-to-end system, SciConceptMiner, for the automatic capture of emerging scientific concepts from both independent knowledge sources (semi-structured data) and academic publications (unstructured documents). First, we adopt a BERT-based sequence labeling model to predict candidate concept phrases with self-supervision data. Then, we incorporate rich Web content for synonym detection and concept selection via a web search API. This two-stage approach achieves highly accurate
(94.7%) concept identification with more than 740K scientific concepts. These concepts are deployed in the Microsoft Academic production system and are the backbone for its semantic search capability.

SciConceptMiner: A system for large-scale scientific concept discovery

This paper announces version 1.0 of the Classical Language Toolkit (CLTK), an NLP framework for pre-modern languages. The vast majority of NLP, its algorithms and software, is created with assumptions particular to living languages, thus neglecting certain important characteristics of largely non-spoken historical languages. Further, scholars of pre-modern languages often have different goals than those of living-language researchers. To fill this void, the CLTK adapts ideas from several leading NLP frameworks to create a novel software architecture that satisfies the unique needs of pre-modern languages and their researchers. Its centerpiece is a modular processing pipeline that balances the competing demands of algorithmic diversity with pre-configured defaults. The CLTK currently provides pipelines, including models, for almost 20 languages.

The {C}lassical {L}anguage {T}oolkit: {A}n {NLP} Framework for Pre-Modern Languages

An essential operation in web corpus construction consists in retaining the desired content while discarding the rest. Another challenge finding one's way through websites. This article introduces a text discovery and extraction tool published under open-source license. Its installation and use is straightforward, notably from Python and on the command-line. The software allows for main text, comments and metadata extraction, while also providing building blocks for web crawling tasks. A comparative evaluation on real-world data also shows its interest as well as the performance of other available solutions.

The contributions of this paper are threefold: it references the software, features a benchmark, and provides a meaningful baseline for similar tasks. The tool performs significantly better than other open-source solutions in this evaluation and in external benchmarks.

Trafilatura: {A} Web Scraping Library and Command-Line Tool for Text Discovery and Extraction

Stereotypes are inferences drawn about people based on their demographic attributes, which may result in harms to users when a system is deployed.
In generative language-inference tasks, given a premise, a model produces plausible hypotheses that follow either logically (natural language inference) or common-sensically (commonsense inference).
Such tasks are therefore a fruitful setting in which to explore the degree to which NLP systems encode stereotypes.
In our work, we study how stereotypes manifest when the potential targets of stereotypes are situated in real-life, neutral contexts.
We collect human judgments on the presence of stereotypes in generated inferences and compare how perceptions of stereotypes vary due to annotator positionality.

Analyzing Stereotypes in Generative Text Inference Tasks

Understanding the gaps between job requirements and university curricula is crucial for improving student success and institutional effectiveness in higher education. In this context, natural language processing (NLP) can be leveraged to generate granular insights into where the gaps are and how they change. This paper proposes a three-dimensional research framework that combines NLP techniques with economic and educational research to quantify the alignment between course syllabi and job postings. We elaborate on key technical details of the framework and further discuss its potential positive impacts on practice, including unveiling the inequalities in and long-term consequences of education-occupation alignment to inform policymakers, and fostering information systems to support students, institutions and employers in the school-to-work pipeline.

A Research Framework for Understanding Education-Occupation Alignment with NLP Techniques

Online conversations, just like offline ones, are susceptible to influence by bad actors. These users have the capacity to derail neutral or even prosocial discussions through adverse behavior. Moderators and users alike would benefit from more resilient online conversations, i.e., those that can survive the influx of antisocial behavior to which many conversations fall victim. In this paper, we examine the notion of conversational resilience: what makes a conversation more or less capable of withstanding an antisocial interruption? Understanding the factors that contribute to resilience in online conversations can help identify what behaviors we should encourage and better inform moderation practices. Working with 10.5M comments from five mainstream subreddits (over 2.9M subscribers each), we compiled more than 5.8M comment threads (i.e., conversations). Using 20K relevant conversations, we investigate the effects of different norm violations on the outcome of a conversation while accounting for community characteristics and the context in which the violation occurs. We find that norm violations that occur at the start of a conversation do not necessarily stop the flow of subsequent comments. Additionally, highly-toxic violations are more likely to occur in comment threads containing other toxic comments, both before and after the violation itself. Finally, more severe violations may not necessarily lead to higher rates of subsequent violations, while the comment author’s history of toxic behavior might.

Restatement and Question Generation for Counsellor Chatbot

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X-Fact: A New Benchmark Dataset for Multilingual Fact Checking

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