Ireland

Identifying changes in individuals&#39; behaviour and mood, as observed via content shared on online platforms, is increasingly gaining importance. Most research to-date on this topic focuses on either: (a) identifying individuals at risk or with a certain mental health condition given a batch of posts or (b) providing equivalent labels at the post level. A disadvantage of such work is the lack of a strong temporal component and the inability to make longitudinal assessments following an individual&#39;s trajectory and allowing timely interventions. Here we define a new task, that of identifying moments of change in individuals on the basis of their shared content online. The changes we consider are sudden shifts in mood (switches) or gradual mood progression (escalations). We have created detailed guidelines for capturing moments of change and a corpus of 500 manually annotated user timelines (18.7K posts). We have developed a variety of baseline models drawing inspiration from related tasks and show that the best performance is obtained through context aware sequential modelling. We also introduce new metrics for capturing rare events in temporal windows.

ACL 2022

Identifying Moments of Change from Longitudinal User Text

longitudinal dataset

longitudinal modelling

mental health

social media

evaluation

# 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). 

Identifying changes in individuals' behaviour and mood, as observed via content shared on online platforms, is increasingly gaining importance. Most research to-date on this topic focuses on either: (a) identifying individuals at risk or with a certain mental health condition given a batch of posts or (b) providing equivalent labels at the post level. A disadvantage of such work is the lack of a strong temporal component and the inability to make longitudinal assessments following an individual's trajectory and allowing timely interventions. Here we define a new task, that of identifying moments of change in individuals on the basis of their shared content online. The changes we consider are sudden shifts in mood (switches) or gradual mood progression (escalations). We have created detailed guidelines for capturing moments of change and a corpus of 500 manually annotated user timelines (18.7K posts). We have developed a variety of baseline models drawing inspiration from related tasks and show that the best performance is obtained through context aware sequential modelling. We also introduce new metrics for capturing rare events in temporal windows.

poster

In this presentation, we introduce our work "Dependency-based Mixture Language Models" accepted by ACL 2022 main conference.

Dependency-based Mixture Language Models

Images are often more significant than only the pixels to human eyes, as we can infer, associate, and reason with contextual information from other sources to establish a more complete picture. For example, in Figure 1, we can find a way to identify the news articles related to the picture through segment-wise understandings of the signs, the buildings, the crowds, and more. This reasoning could provide the time and place the image was taken, which will help us in subsequent tasks, such as automatic storyline construction, correction of image source in intended effect photographs, and upper-stream processing such as image clustering for certain location or time.

In this work, we formulate this problem and introduce TARA: a dataset with 16k images with their associated news, time, and location, automatically extracted from New York Times, and an additional 61k examples as distant supervision from WIT. On top of the extractions, we present a crowdsourced subset in which we believe it is possible to find the images' spatio-temporal information for evaluation purpose. We show that there exists a 70% gap between a state-of-the-art joint model and human performance, which is slightly filled by our proposed model that uses segment-wise reasoning, motivating higher-level vision-language joint models that can conduct open-ended reasoning with world knowledge. The data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/zeyofu/TARA.

There’s a Time and Place for Reasoning Beyond the Image

Character-level masking is verified effective in BERT and whole-word masking is also widely adopted by different pre-train models. In this presentation, we explore to answer the question about which masking strategy is better and what are their advantages and disadvantages respectively.

"Is Whole Word Masking Always Better for Chinese BERT?": Probing on Chinese Grammatical Error Correction

Contrastive learning has shown great potential in unsupervised sentence embedding tasks, e.g., SimCSE . However, these existing solutions are heavily affected by superficial features like the length of sentences or syntactic structures. In this paper, we propose a semantic-aware contrastive learning framework for sentence embeddings, termed Pseudo-Token BERT (PT-BERT), which is able to explore the pseudo-token space (i.e., latent semantic space) representation of a sentence while eliminating the impact of superficial features such as sentence length and syntax. Specifically, we introduce an additional pseudo token embedding layer independent of the BERT encoder to map each sentence into a sequence of pseudo tokens in a fixed length. Leveraging these pseudo sequences, we are able to construct same-length positive and negative pairs based on the attention mechanism to perform contrastive learning. In addition, we utilize both the gradient-updating and momentum-updating encoders to encode instances while dynamically maintaining an additional queue to store the representation of sentence embeddings, enhancing the encoder's learning performance for negative examples. Experiments show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines on six standard semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks. Furthermore, experiments on alignments and uniformity losses, as well as hard examples with different sentence lengths and syntax, consistently verify the effectiveness of our method.

A Sentence is Worth 128 Pseudo Tokens: A Semantic-Aware Contrastive Learning Framework for Sentence Embeddings

We present AbductionRules, a group of natural language datasets designed to train and test generalisable abduction over natural-language knowledge bases.

AbductionRules: Training Transformers to Explain Unexpected Inputs

Introduce our work, C3KG: A Chinese Commonsense Conversation Knowledge Graph, from background, method, evaluation and application

C$^3$KG: A Chinese Commonsense Conversation Knowledge Graph

We study cross-lingual UMLS named entity linking, where mentions in a given source language are mapped to UMLS concepts, most of which are labeled in English. 
Our cross-lingual framework includes an offline unsupervised construction of a translated UMLS dictionary and a per-document pipeline which identifies UMLS candidate mentions and uses a fine-tuned pretrained transformer language model to filter candidates according to context. Our method exploits a small dataset of manually annotated UMLS mentions in the source language and uses this supervised data in two ways: to extend the unsupervised UMLS dictionary and to fine-tune the contextual filtering of candidate mentions in full documents.
We demonstrate results of our approach on both Hebrew and English. We achieve new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on the Hebrew Camoni corpus, +8.9 F1 on average across three communities in the dataset. We also achieve new SOTA on the English dataset MedMentions with +7.3 F1.

Cross-Lingual UMLS Named Entity Linking using UMLS Dictionary Fine-Tuning

We study event understanding as a critical step towards visual commonsense tasks. Meanwhile, we argue that current object-based event understanding is purely likelihood-based, leading to incorrect event prediction, due to biased correlation between events and objects. We propose to mitigate such biases with do-calculus, proposed in causality research, but overcoming its limited robustness, by an optimized aggregation with association-based prediction. We show the effectiveness of our approach, intrinsically by comparing our generated events with
ground-truth event annotation, and extrinsically by downstream commonsense tasks.

Debiasing Event Understanding for Visual Commonsense Tasks

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) aim to learn universal language representations by conducting self-supervised training tasks on large-scale corpora. Since PLMs capture word semantics in different contexts, the quality of word representations highly depends on word frequency, which usually follows a heavy-tailed distributions in the pre-training corpus. Therefore, the embeddings of rare words on the tail are usually poorly optimized. In this work, we focus on enhancing language model pre-training by leveraging definitions of the rare words in dictionaries (e.g., Wiktionary). To incorporate a rare word definition as a part of input, we fetch its definition from the dictionary and append it to the end of the input text sequence. In addition to training with the masked language modeling objective, we propose two novel self-supervised pre-training tasks on word and sentence-level alignment between input text sequence and rare word definitions to enhance language modeling representation with dictionary. We evaluate the proposed Dict-BERT model on the language understanding benchmark GLUE and eight specialized domain benchmark datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Dict-BERT can significantly improve the understanding of rare words and boost model performance on various NLP downstream tasks.

Dict-BERT: Enhancing Language Model Pre-training with Dictionary

Fast and reliable evaluation metrics are key to R&D progress.
While traditional natural language generation metrics are fast, they are not very reliable.
Conversely, new metrics based on large pretrained language models are much more reliable, but require significant computational resources.
In this work, we propose FrugalScore, an approach to learn a fixed, low cost version of any expensive NLG metric, while retaining most of its original performance.
Experiments with BERTScore and MoverScore on summarization and translation show that FrugalScore is on par with the original metrics (and sometimes better), while having several orders of magnitude less parameters and running several times faster.

Identifying Moments of Change from Longitudinal User Text

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