Dominican Republic

A key solution to temporal sentence grounding (TSG) exists in how to learn effective alignment between vision and language features extracted from an untrimmed video and a sentence description. Existing methods mainly leverage vanilla soft attention to perform the alignment in a single-step process. However, such single-step attention is insufficient in practice, since complicated relations between inter- and intra-modality are usually obtained through multi-step reasoning. In this paper, we propose an Iterative Alignment Network (IA-Net) for TSG task, which iteratively interacts inter- and intra-modal features within multiple steps for more accurate grounding. Specifically, during the iterative reasoning process, we pad multi-modal features with learnable parameters to alleviate the nowhere-to-attend problem of non-matched frame-word pairs, and enhance the basic co-attention mechanism in a parallel manner. To further calibrate the misaligned attention caused by each reasoning step, we also devise a calibration module following each attention module to refine the alignment knowledge. With such iterative alignment scheme, our IA-Net can robustly capture the fine-grained relations between vision and language domains step-by-step for progressively reasoning the temporal boundaries. Extensive experiments conducted on three challenging benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed model performs better than the state-of-the-arts.

EMNLP 2021

Progressively Guide to Attend: An Iterative Alignment Framework for Temporal Sentence Grounding

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

poster

To ease the difficulty of argument stance classification, the task of same side stance classification (S3C) has been proposed. In contrast to actual stance classification, which requires a substantial amount of domain knowledge to identify whether an argument is in favor or against a certain issue, it is argued that, for S3C, only argument similarity within stances needs to be learned to successfully solve the task. We evaluate several transformer-based approaches on the dataset of the recent S3C shared task, followed by an in-depth evaluation and error analysis of our model and the task's hypothesis. We show that, although we achieve state-of-the-art results, our model fails to generalize both within as well as across topics and domains when adjusting the sampling strategy of the training and test set to a more adversarial scenario. Our evaluation shows that current state-of-the-art approaches cannot determine same side stance by considering only domain-independent linguistic similarity features, but appear to require domain knowledge and semantic inference, too.

On Classifying whether Two Texts are on the Same Side of an Argument

In multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA), the performance of a model highly depends on the quality of synthesized embeddings. These embeddings are generated from the upstream process called multimodal fusion, which aims to extract and combine the input unimodal raw data to produce a richer multimodal representation. Previous work either back-propagates the task loss or manipulates the geometric property of feature spaces to produce favorable fusion results, which neglects the preservation of critical task-related information that flows from input to the fusion results. In this work, we propose a framework named MultiModal InfoMax (MMIM), which hierarchically maximizes the Mutual Information (MI) in unimodal input pairs (inter-modality) and between multimodal fusion result and unimodal input in order to maintain task-related information through multimodal fusion. The framework is jointly trained with the main task (MSA) to improve the performance of the downstream MSA task. To address the intractable issue of MI bounds, we further formulate a set of computationally simple parametric and non-parametric methods to approximate their truth value. Experimental results on the two widely used datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our approach

Improving Multimodal Fusion with Hierarchical Mutual Information Maximization for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Online forums such as ChangeMyView have been explored to research aspects of persuasion and argumentative quality in language. While previous research has focused on arguments between a view-holder and a persuaded, we explore the premise that apart from the merits of arguments, persuasion is influenced by the ambient social community. We hypothesize that comments from the rest of the community can either affirm the original view or implicitly exert pressure to change it. We develop a structured model to capture the ambient community’s sentiment towards the discussion and its effect on persuasion. Our experiments show that social features themselves are significantly predictive of persuasion (even without looking at the actual content of discussion), with performance comparable to some earlier approaches that use content features. Our analyses suggest that the effect of social pressure is comparable to the difference between persuasive and non-persuasive language strategies in driving persuasion and that social pressure might be a causal factor for persuasion.

Does Social Pressure Drive Persuasion in Online Fora?

Research in emotion analysis is scattered across different label formats (e.g., polarity types, basic emotion categories, and affective dimensions), linguistic levels (word vs. sentence vs. discourse), and, of course, (few well-resourced but much more under- resourced) natural languages and text genres (e.g., product reviews, tweets, news). The resulting heterogeneity makes data and software developed under these conflicting constraints hard to compare and challenging to integrate. To resolve this unsatisfactory state of affairs we here propose a training scheme that learns a shared latent representation of emotion independent from different label formats, natural languages, and even disparate model architectures. Experiments on a wide range of datasets indicate that this approach yields the desired interoperability without penalizing prediction quality. Code and data are archived under DOI 10.5281/zenodo.5466068.

Towards Label-Agnostic Emotion Embeddings

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) deals with extracting opinion triplets, consisting of an opinion target or aspect, its associated sentiment, and the corresponding opinion term/span explaining the rationale behind the sentiment. Existing research efforts are majorly tagging-based. Among the methods taking a sequence tagging approach, some fail to capture the strong interdependence between the three opinion factors, whereas others fall short of identifying triplets with overlapping aspect/opinion spans. A recent grid tagging approach on the other hand fails to capture the span-level semantics while predicting the sentiment between an aspect-opinion pair. Different from these, we present a tagging-free solution for the task, while addressing the limitations of the existing works. We adapt an encoder-decoder architecture with a Pointer Network-based decoding framework that generates an entire opinion triplet at each time step thereby making our solution end-to-end. Interactions between the aspects and opinions are effectively captured by the decoder by considering their entire detected spans while predicting their connecting sentiment. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets establish the better efficacy of our proposed approach, especially in the recall, and in predicting multiple and aspect/opinion-overlapped triplets from the same review sentence. We report our results both with and without BERT and also demonstrate the utility of domain-specific BERT post-training for the task.

PASTE: A Tagging-Free Decoding Framework Using Pointer Networks for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction

Sentiment analysis systems have been shown to exhibit sensitivity to protected attributes. Round-trip translation, on the other hand, has been shown to normalize text. We explore the impact of round-trip translation on the demographic parity of sentiment classifiers and show how round-trip translation consistently improves classification fairness at test time (reducing up to 27\% of between-group gaps). We also explore the idea of retraining sentiment classifiers on round-trip-translated data.

The Effect of Round-Trip Translation on Fairness in Sentiment Analysis

Several recent studies on dyadic human-human interactions have been done on conversations without specific business objectives. However, many companies might benefit from studies dedicated to more precise environments such as after sales services or customer satisfaction surveys. In this work, we place ourselves in the scope of a live chat customer service in which we want to detect emotions and their evolution in the conversation flow. This context leads to multiple challenges that range from exploiting restricted, small and mostly unlabeled datasets to finding and adapting methods for such context. We tackle these challenges by using Few-Shot Learning while making the hypothesis it can serve conversational emotion classification for different languages and sparse labels. We contribute by proposing a variation of Prototypical Networks for sequence labeling in conversation that we name ProtoSeq. We test this method on two datasets with different languages: daily conversations in English and customer service chat conversations in French. When applied to emotion classification in conversations, our method proved to be competitive even when compared to other ones. The code for ProtoSeq is available at https://github.com/gguibon/ProtoSeq

Few-Shot Emotion Recognition in Conversation with Sequential Prototypical Networks

Fine-grained classification involves dealing with datasets with larger number of classes with subtle differences between them. Guiding the model to focus on differentiating dimensions between these commonly confusable classes is key to improving performance on fine-grained tasks. In this work, we analyse the contrastive fine-tuning of pre-trained language models on two fine-grained text classification tasks, emotion classification, and sentiment analysis. We adaptively embed class relationships into a contrastive objective function to help differently weigh the positives and negatives, and in particular, weighting closely confusable negatives more than less similar negative examples. We find that Label-aware Contrastive Loss outperforms previous contrastive methods, in the presence of larger number and/or more confusable classes, and helps models to produce output distributions that are more differentiated.

Not All Negatives are Equal: Label-Aware Contrastive Loss for Fine-grained Text Classification

By exploiting the cross-modal attention, cross-BERT methods have achieved state-of-the-art accuracy in cross-modal retrieval. Nevertheless, the heavy text-image interactions in the cross-BERT model are prohibitively slow for large-scale retrieval. Late-interaction methods trade off retrieval accuracy and efficiency by exploiting cross-modal interaction only in the late stage, attaining a satisfactory retrieval speed. In this work, we propose an inflating and shrinking approach to further boost the efficiency and accuracy of late-interaction methods. The inflating operation plugs several codes in the input of the encoder to exploit the text-image interactions more thoroughly for higher retrieval accuracy. Then the shrinking operation gradually reduces the text-image interactions through knowledge distilling for higher efficiency. Through an inflating operation followed by a shrinking operation, both efficiency and accuracy of a late-interaction model are boosted. Systematic experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our inflating and shrinking approach.

Inflate and Shrink:Enriching and Reducing Interactions for Fast Text-Image Retrieval

We address the problem of temporal sentence localization in videos (TSLV). Traditional methods follow a top-down framework which localizes the target segment with pre-defined segment proposals. Although they have achieved decent performance, the proposals are handcrafted and redundant. Recently, bottom-up framework attracts increasing attention due to its superior efficiency. It directly predicts the probabilities for each frame as a boundary. However, the performance of bottom-up model is inferior to the top-down counterpart as it fails to exploit the segment-level interaction. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Proposal Generation Network (APGN) to maintain the segment-level interaction while speeding up the efficiency. Specifically, we first perform a foreground-background classification upon the video and regress on the foreground frames to adaptively generate proposals. In this way, the handcrafted proposal design is discarded and the redundant proposals are decreased. Then, a proposal consolidation module is further developed to enhance the semantic of the generated proposals. Finally, we locate the target moments with these generated proposals following the top-down framework. Extensive experiments on three challenging benchmarks show that our proposed APGN significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.

Progressively Guide to Attend: An Iterative Alignment Framework for Temporal Sentence Grounding

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