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How difficult is it for English-as-a-second language (ESL) learners to read noisy English texts? Do ESL learners need lexical normalization to read noisy English texts?
These questions may also affect community formation on social networking sites where differences can be attributed to ESL learners and native English speakers.
However, few studies have addressed these questions.
To this end, we built highly accurate readability assessors to evaluate the readability of texts for ESL learners. We then applied these assessors to noisy English texts to further assess the readability of the texts.
The experimental results showed that although intermediate-level ESL learners can read most noisy English texts in the first place, lexical normalization significantly improves the readability of noisy English texts for ESL learners.

EMNLP 2021

To What Extent Does Lexical Normalization Help English-as-a-Second Language Learners to Read Noisy English Texts?

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
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ACL 2022

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

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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.

News recommendation is critical for personalized news access. Most existing news recommendation methods rely on centralized storage of users' historical news click behavior data, which may lead to privacy concerns and hazards. Federated Learning is a privacy-preserving framework for multiple clients to collaboratively train models without sharing their private data. However, the computation and communication cost of directly learning many existing news recommendation models in a federated way are unacceptable for user clients. In this paper, we propose an efficient federated learning framework for privacy-preserving news recommendation. Instead of training and communicating the whole model, we decompose the news recommendation model into a large news model maintained in the server and a light-weight user model shared on both server and clients, where news representations and user model are communicated between server and clients. More specifically, the clients request the user model and news representations from the server, and send their locally computed gradients to the server for aggregation. The server updates its global user model with the aggregated gradients, and further updates its news model to infer updated news representations. Since the local gradients may contain private information, we propose a secure aggregation method to aggregate gradients in a privacy-preserving way. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that our method can reduce the computation and communication cost on clients while keep promising model performance.

Efficient-FedRec: Efficient Federated Learning Framework for Privacy-Preserving News Recommendation

Passage retrieval and ranking is a key task in open-domain question answering and information retrieval. Current effective approaches mostly rely on pre-trained deep language model-based retrievers and rankers. These methods have been shown to effectively model the semantic matching between queries and passages, also in presence of keyword mismatch, i.e. passages that are relevant to a query but do not contain important query keywords. In this paper we consider the Dense Retriever (DR), a passage retrieval method, and the BERT re-ranker, a popular passage re-ranking method. In this context, we formally investigate how these models respond and adapt to a specific type of keyword mismatch -- that caused by keyword typos occurring in queries. Through empirical investigation, we find that typos can lead to a significant drop in retrieval and ranking effectiveness. We then propose a simple typos-aware training framework for DR and BERT re-ranker to address this issue. Our experimental results on the MS MARCO passage ranking dataset show that, with our proposed typos-aware training, DR and BERT re-ranker can become robust to typos in queries, resulting in significantly improved effectiveness compared to models trained without appropriately accounting for typos.

Dealing with Typos for BERT-based Passage Retrieval and Ranking

Cross-lingual entity alignment (EA) aims to find the equivalent entities between cross-lingual KGs (Knowledge Graphs), which is a crucial step for integrating KGs. Recently, many GNN-based EA methods are proposed and show decent performance improvements on several public datasets. However, existing GNN-based EA methods inevitably inherit poor interpretability and low efficiency from neural networks. Motivated by the isomorphic assumption of GNN-based methods, we successfully transform the cross-lingual EA problem into an assignment problem. Based on this re-definition, we propose a frustratingly Simple but Effective Unsupervised entity alignment method (SEU) without neural networks. Extensive experiments have been conducted to show that our proposed unsupervised approach even beats advanced supervised methods across all public datasets while having high efficiency, interpretability, and stability.

From Alignment to Assignment: Frustratingly Simple Unsupervised Entity Alignment

This paper describes a compact and effective model for low-latency passage retrieval in con- versational search based on learned dense rep- resentations. Prior to our work, the state-of- the-art approach uses a multi-stage pipeline comprising conversational query reformula- tion and information retrieval modules. De- spite its effectiveness, such a pipeline often includes multiple neural models that require long inference times. In addition, indepen- dently optimizing each module ignores de- pendencies among them. To address these shortcomings, we propose to integrate conver- sational query reformulation directly into a dense retrieval model. To aid in this goal, we create a dataset with pseudo-relevance labels for conversational search to overcome the lack of training data and to explore different train- ing strategies. We demonstrate that our model effectively rewrites conversational queries as dense representations in conversational search and open-domain question answering datasets. Finally, after observing that our model learns to adjust the L2 norm of query token embed- dings, we leverage this property for hybrid re- trieval and to support error analysis.

Contextualized Query Embeddings for Conversational Search

The semantic matching capabilities of neural information retrieval can ameliorate synonymy and polysemy problems of symbolic approaches. However, neural models' dense representations are more suitable for re-ranking, due to their inefficiency. Sparse representations, either in symbolic or latent form, are more efficient with an inverted index. Taking the merits of the sparse and dense representations, we propose an ultra-high dimensional (UHD) representation scheme equipped with directly controllable sparsity. UHD's large capacity and minimal noise and interference among the dimensions allow for binarized representations, which are highly efficient for storage and search. Also proposed is a bucketing method, where the embeddings from multiple layers of BERT are selected/merged to represent diverse linguistic aspects. We test our models with MS MARCO and TREC CAR, showing that our model outperforms other sparse models.

Ultra-High Dimensional Sparse Representations with Binarization for Efficient Text Retrieval

Twitter is commonly used for civil unrest detection and forecasting tasks, but there is a lack of work in evaluating how civil unrest manifests on Twitter across countries and events. 
We present two in-depth case studies for two specific large-scale events, one in a country with high (English) Twitter usage (Johannesburg riots in South Africa) and one in a country with low Twitter usage (Burayu massacre protests in Ethiopia). 
We show that while there is event signal during the events, there is little signal leading up to the events.
In addition to the case studies, we train n-gram-based models on a larger set of Twitter civil unrest data across time, events, and countries and use machine learning explainability tools (SHAP) to identify important features. The models were able to find words indicative of civil unrest that generalized across countries. The 42 countries span Africa, Middle East, and Southeast Asia and the events range occur between 2014 and 2019.

Study of Manifestation of Civil Unrest on Twitter

User-generated texts include various types of stylistic properties, or noises. Such texts are not properly processed by existing morpheme analyzers or language models based on formal texts such as encyclopedias or news articles. In this paper, we propose a simple morphologically tight-fitting tokenizer (K-MT) that can better process proper nouns, coinages, and internet slang among other types of noise in Korean user-generated texts. We tested our tokenizer by performing classification tasks on Korean user-generated movie reviews and hate speech datasets, and the Korean Named Entity Recognition dataset. Through our tests, we found that K-MT is better fit to process internet slangs, proper nouns, and coinages, compared to a morpheme analyzer and a character-level WordPiece tokenizer.

The Korean Morphologically Tight-Fitting Tokenizer for Noisy User-Generated Texts

We propose a character-based non-autoregressive GEC approach, with automatically generated character transformations. Recently, per-word classification of correction edits has proven an efficient, parallelizable alternative to current encoder-decoder GEC systems. We show that word replacement edits may be suboptimal and lead to explosion of rules for spelling, diacritization and errors in morphologically rich languages, and propose a method for generating character transformations from GEC corpus. Finally, we train character transformation models for Czech, German and Russian, reaching solid results and dramatic speedup compared to autoregressive systems.

Character Transformations for Non-Autoregressive GEC Tagging

Recent impressive improvements in NLP, largely based on the success of contextual neural language models, have been mostly demonstrated on at most a couple of dozen high-resource languages. Building language models and, more generally, NLP systems for non-standardized and low-resource languages remains a challenging task. In this work, we focus on North-African colloquial dialectal Arabic written using an extension of the Latin script, calledNArabizi, found mostly on social media and messaging communication. In this low-resource scenario with data displaying a high level of variability, we compare the downstream performance of a character-based language model on part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing to that of monolingual and multilingual models. We show that a character-based model trained on only 99k sentences ofNArabiziand fined-tuned on a small treebank of this language leads to a performance close to those obtained with the same architecture pre-trained on large multilingual and monolingual models. Confirming these results a on much larger data set of noisy French user-generated content, we argue that such character-based language models can be an asset for NLP in low-resource and high language variability set-tings.

Can Character-based Language Models Improve Downstream Task Performances In Low-Resource And Noisy Language Scenarios?

The increasing use of social media sites in countries like India has given rise to large volumes of code-mixed data. Sentiment analysis of this data can provide integral insights into people's perspectives and opinions. Code-mixed data is often noisy in nature due to multiple spellings for the same word, lack of definite order of words in a sentence, and random abbreviations. Thus, working with code-mixed data is more challenging than monolingual data. Interpreting a model's predictions allows us to determine the robustness of the model against different forms of noise. In this paper, we propose a methodology to integrate explainable approaches into code-mixed sentiment analysis. By interpreting the predictions of sentiment analysis models we evaluate how well the model is able to adapt to the implicit noises present in code-mixed data.

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To What Extent Does Lexical Normalization Help English-as-a-Second Language Learners to Read Noisy English Texts?

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Efficient-FedRec: Efficient Federated Learning Framework for Privacy-Preserving News Recommendation

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