Dominican Republic

Online social media platforms increasinglyrely on Natural Language Processing (NLP)techniques to detect abusive content at scalein order to mitigate the harms it causes totheir users. However, these techniques suf-fer from various sampling and association bi-ases present in training data, often resultingin sub-par performance on content relevantto marginalized groups, potentially furtheringdisproportionate harms towards them. Studieson such biases so far have focused on only ahandful of axes of disparities and subgroupsthat have annotations/lexicons available. Con-sequently, biases concerning non-Western con-texts are largely ignored in the literature. Inthis paper, we introduce a weakly supervisedmethod to robustly detect lexical biases inbroader geocultural contexts. Through a casestudy on a publicly available toxicity detec-tion model, we demonstrate that our methodidentifies salient groups of cross-geographicerrors, and, in a follow up, demonstrate thatthese groupings reflect human judgments of of-fensive and inoffensive language in those geo-graphic contexts. We also conduct analysis ofa model trained on a dataset with ground truthlabels to better understand these biases, andpresent preliminary mitigation experiments.

EMNLP 2021

Detecting and Evaluating Cross-Geographic Biases in Toxicity Modelingon Social Media Text

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.

workshop paper

mplicit event argument extraction (EAE) is a crucial document-level information extraction task that aims to identify event arguments beyond the sentence level. Despite many efforts for this task, the lack of enough training data has long impeded the study. In this paper, we take a new perspective to address the data sparsity issue faced by implicit EAE, by bridging the task with machine reading comprehension (MRC). Particularly, we devise two data augmentation regimes via MRC, including: 1) implicit knowledge transfer, which enables knowledge transfer from other tasks, by building a unified training framework in the MRC formulation, and 2) explicit data augmentation, which can explicitly generate new training examples, by treating MRC models as an annotator. The extensive experiments have justified the effectiveness of our approach — it not only obtains state-of-the-art performance on two benchmarks, but also demonstrates superior results in a data-low scenario.

Machine Reading Comprehension as Data Augmentation: A Case Study on Implicit Event Argument Extraction

Dialogue-based relation extraction (DiaRE) aims to detect the structural information from unstructured utterances in dialogues. Existing relation extraction models may be unsatisfactory under such a conversational setting, due to the entangled logic and information sparsity issues in utterances involving multiple speakers. To this end, we introduce SOLS, a novel model which can explicitly induce speaker-oriented latent structures for better DiaRE. Specifically, we learn latent structures to capture the relationships among tokens beyond the utterance boundaries, alleviating the entangled logic issue. During the learning process, our speaker-specific regularization method progressively highlights speaker-related key clues and erases the irrelevant ones, alleviating the information sparsity issue. Experiments on three public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Speaker-Oriented Latent Structures for Dialogue-Based Relation Extraction

Span extraction, aiming to extract text spans (such as words or phrases) from plain texts, is a fundamental process in Information Extraction. Recent works introduce the label knowledge to enhance the text representation by formalizing the span extraction task into a question answering problem (QA Formalization), which achieves state-of-the-art performance. However, QA Formalization does not fully exploit the label knowledge and suffers from low efficiency in training/inference. To address those problems, we introduce a new paradigm to integrate label knowledge and further propose a novel model to explicitly and efficiently integrate label knowledge into text representations. Specifically, it encodes texts and label annotations independently and then integrates label knowledge into text representation with an elaborate-designed semantics fusion module. We conduct extensive experiments on three typical span extraction tasks: flat NER, nested NER, and event detection. The empirical results show that 1) our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on four benchmarks, and 2) reduces training time and inference time by 76% and 77% on average, respectively, compared with the QA Formalization paradigm.

Enhanced Language Representation with Label Knowledge for Span Extraction

Low-resource Relation Extraction (LRE) aims to extract relation facts from limited labeled corpora when human annotation is scarce. Existing works either utilize self-training scheme to generate pseudo labels that will cause the gradual drift problem, or leverage metalearning scheme which does not solicit feedback explicitly. To alleviate selection bias due to the lack of feedback loops in existing LRE learning paradigms, we developed a Gradient Imitation Reinforcement Learning method to encourage pseudo label data to imitate the gradient descent direction on labeled data and bootstrap its optimization capability through trial and error. We also propose a framework called GradLRE, which handles two major scenarios in low-resource relation extraction. Besides the scenario where unlabeled data is sufficient, GradLRE handles the situation where no unlabeled data is available, by exploiting a contextualized augmentation method to generate data. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of GradLRE on low resource relation extraction when comparing with baselines.

Gradient Imitation Reinforcement Learning for Low Resource Relation Extraction

Bootstrapping has become the mainstream method for entity set expansion. Conventional bootstrapping methods mostly define the expansion boundary using seed-based distance metrics, which heavily depend on the quality of selected seeds and are hard to be adjusted due to the extremely sparse supervision. In this paper, we propose BootstrapGAN, a new learning method for bootstrapping which jointly models the bootstrapping process and the boundary learning process in a GAN framework. Specifically, the expansion boundaries of different bootstrapping iterations are learned via different discriminator networks; the bootstrapping network is the generator to generate new positive entities, and the discriminator networks identify the expansion boundaries by trying to distinguish the generated entities from known positive entities. By iteratively performing the above adversarial learning, the generator and the discriminators can reinforce each other and be progressively refined along the whole bootstrapping process. Experiments show that BootstrapGAN achieves the new state-of-the-art entity set expansion performance.

Progressive Adversarial Learning for Bootstrapping: A Case Study on Entity Set Expansion

Following the increasing performance of neural machine translation systems, the paradigm of using automatically translated data for cross-lingual adaptation is now studied in several applicative domains. The capacity to accurately project annotations remains however an issue for sequence tagging tasks where annotation must be projected with correct spans. Additionally, when the task implies noisy user-generated text, the quality of translation and annotation projection can be affected. In this paper we propose to tackle multilingual sequence tagging with a new span alignment method and apply it to opinion target extraction from customer reviews. We show that provided suitable heuristics, translated data with automatic span-level annotation projection can yield improvements both for cross-lingual adaptation compared to zero-shot transfer, and data augmentation compared to a multilingual baseline.

SpanAlign: Efficient Sequence Tagging Annotation Projection into Translated Data applied to Cross-Lingual Opinion Mining

Social media is an essential tool to share information about crisis events, such as natural disasters. Event Detection aims at extracting information in the form of an event, but considers each event in isolation, without combining information across sentences or events. Many posts in Crisis NLP contain repetitive or complementary information which needs to be aggregated (e.g., the number of trapped people and their location) for disaster response. Although previous approaches in Crisis NLP aggregate information across posts, they only use shallow representations of the content (e.g., keywords), which cannot adequately represent the semantics of a crisis
event and its sub-events. In this work, we propose a novel framework to extract critical subevents from a large-scale crisis event by combining important information across relevant tweets. Our framework first converts all the tweets from a crisis event into a temporally ordered set of graphs. Then it extracts subgraphs that represent semantic relationships connecting verbs and nouns in 3 to 6 node subgraphs. It does this by learning edge weights via Dynamic Graph Convolutional Networks (DGCNs) and extracting smaller, relevant subgraphs. Our experiments show that our extracted structures (1) are semantically meaningful sub-events and (2) contain information important for the large crisis-event. Furthermore, we show that our approach significantly outperforms event detection baselines, highlighting
the importance of aggregating information across tweets for our task.

A Novel Framework for Detecting Important Subevents from Crisis Events via Dynamic Semantic Graphs

Most of the existing studies of language use in social media content have focused on the surface-level linguistic features and the semantic level aspects of the comments. The writer‘s strategies of constructing and connecting text segments have not been widely explored. Contributing to this analysis direction for social media studies, we build a comparable neural RST parsing system that analyzes discourse relations in persuasive and non-persuasive comments. Our work demonstrates the potential of analyzing discourse structures of online comments with our system and the implications of these structures for understanding online communications.

Neural-based RST Parsing And Analysis In Persuasive Discourse

Optical character recognition (OCR) from newspaper page images is susceptible to noise due to degradation of old documents and variation in typesetting. In this report, we present a novel approach to OCR post-correction. We cast error correction as a translation task, and fine-tune BART, a transformer-based sequence-to-sequence language model pretrained to denoise corrupted text. We are the first to use sentence-level transformer models for OCR post-correction, and our best model achieves a 29.4% improvement in character accuracy over the original noisy OCR text. Our results demonstrate the utility of pretrained language models for dealing with noisy text.

BART for Post-Correction of OCR Newspaper Text

Stance detection (SD) entails classifying the sentiment of a text towards a given target, and is a relevant sub-task for opinion mining and social media analysis. Recent works have explored knowledge infusion - supplementing the linguistic competence and latent knowledge of large pre-trained language models with structured knowledge graphs (KGs), yet few works have applied such methods to the SD task. In this work, we first perform stance-relevant knowledge probing on Transformers-based pre-trained models in a zero-shot setting, showing these models' latent real-world knowledge about SD targets and their sensitivity to context. We then propose novel knowledge-enriched stance detection models. We evaluate them on two Twitter stance datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance on both.

Detecting and Evaluating Cross-Geographic Biases in Toxicity Modelingon Social Media Text

Next from EMNLP 2021

Machine Reading Comprehension as Data Augmentation: A Case Study on Implicit Event Argument Extraction

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