Ireland

Recent work has shown that distributed word representations can encode abstract information from child-directed speech. In this paper, we use diachronic distributed word representations to perform temporal modeling and analysis of lexical development in children. Unlike all previous work, we use temporally sliced corpus to learn distributed word representations of child-speech and child-directed speech under a curriculum-learning setting. In our experiments, we perform a lexical categorization task to plot the semantic and syntactic knowledge acquisition trajectories in children. Next, we perform linear mixed-effects modeling over the diachronic representational changes to study the role of input word frequencies in the rate of word acquisition in children. We also perform a fine-grained analysis of lexical knowledge transfer from adults to children using Representational Similarity Analysis. Finally, we perform a qualitative analysis of the diachronic representations from our model, which reveals the grounding and word associations in the mental lexicon of children. Our experiments demonstrate the ease of usage and effectiveness of diachronic distributed word representations in modeling lexical development.

ACL 2022

Towards Using Diachronic Distributed Word Representations as Models of Lexical Development

lexical development

child language

diachronic embeddings

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

poster

# 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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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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Fact-checking is an essential tool to mitigate the spread of misinformation and disinformation. We introduce the task of fact-checking in dialogue, which is a relatively unexplored area. We construct DialFact, a testing benchmark dataset of 22,245 annotated conversational claims, paired with pieces of evidence from Wikipedia. There are three sub-tasks in DialFact: 1) Verifiable claim detection task distinguishes whether a response carries verifiable factual information; 2) Evidence retrieval task retrieves the most relevant Wikipedia snippets as evidence; 3) Claim verification task predicts a dialogue response to be supported, refuted, or not enough information. We found that existing fact-checking models trained on non-dialogue data like FEVER fail to perform well on our task, and thus, we propose a simple yet data-efficient solution to effectively improve fact-checking performance in dialogue. We point out unique challenges in DialFact such as handling the colloquialisms, coreferences and retrieval ambiguities in the error analysis to shed light on future research in this direction.

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Towards Using Diachronic Distributed Word Representations as Models of Lexical Development

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DoCoGen: Domain Counterfactual Generation for Low Resource Domain Adaptation

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