Ireland

A user-generated text on social media enables health workers to keep track of information, identify possible outbreaks, forecast disease trends, monitor emergency cases, and ascertain disease awareness and response to official health correspondence. This exchange of health information on social media has been regarded as an attempt to enhance public health surveillance (PHS). Despite its potential, the technology is still in its early stages and is not ready for widespread application. Advancements in pretrained language models (PLMs) have facilitated the development of several domain-specific PLMs and a variety of downstream applications. However, there are no PLMs for social media tasks involving PHS. We present and release PHS-BERT, a transformer-based PLM, to identify tasks related to public health surveillance on social media. We compared and benchmarked the performance of PHS-BERT on 25 datasets from different social medial platforms related to 7 different PHS tasks. Compared with existing PLMs that are mainly evaluated on limited tasks, PHS-BERT achieved state-of-the-art performance on all 25 tested datasets, showing that our PLM is robust and generalizable in the common PHS tasks. By making PHS-BERT available, we aim to facilitate the community to reduce the computational cost and introduce new baselines for future works across various PHS-related tasks.

ACL 2022

Benchmarking for Public Health Surveillance tasks on Social Media with a Domain-Specific Pretrained Language Model

benchamarking

public health surveillance

domain-specific language model

social media

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# 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). 

Relation classification models are conventionally evaluated using only a single measure, e.g., micro-F1, macro-F1 or AUC. In this work, we analyze weighting schemes, such as micro and macro, for imbalanced datasets. We introduce a framework for weighting schemes, where existing schemes are extremes, and two new intermediate schemes. We show that reporting results of different weighting schemes better highlights strengths and weaknesses of a model.

Why only Micro-F1? Class Weighting of Measures for Relation Classification

Recent improvements in automatic news summarization fundamentally rely on large corpora of news articles and their summaries. These corpora are often constructed by scraping news websites, which results in including not only summaries but also other kinds of texts. Apart from more generic noise, we identify straplines as a form of text scraped from news websites that commonly turn out not to be summaries. The presence of these non-summaries threatens the validity of scraped corpora as benchmarks for news summarization. We have annotated extracts from two news sources that form part of the Newsroom corpus (Grusky et al., 2018), labeling those which were straplines, those which were summaries, and those which were both. We present a rule-based strapline detection method that achieves good performance on a manually annotated test set. Automatic evaluation indicates that removing straplines and noise from the training data of a news summarizer results in higher quality summaries, with improvements as high as 7 points ROUGE score.

Automatically Discarding Straplines to Improve Data Quality for Abstractive News Summarization

Although recent Massively Multilingual Language Models (MMLMs) like mBERT and XLMR support around 100 languages, most existing multilingual NLP benchmarks provide evaluation data in only a handful of these languages with little linguistic diversity. We argue that this makes the existing practices in multilingual evaluation unreliable and does not provide a full picture of the performance of MMLMs across the linguistic landscape. We propose that the recent work done in Performance Prediction for NLP tasks can serve as a potential solution in fixing benchmarking in Multilingual NLP by utilizing features related to data and language typology to estimate the performance of an MMLM on different languages. We compare performance prediction with translating test data with a case study on four different multilingual datasets, and observe that these methods can provide reliable estimates of the performance that are often on-par with the translation based approaches, without the need for any additional translation as well as evaluation costs.

Beyond Static models and test sets: Benchmarking the potential of pre-trained models across tasks and languages

Behavioural testing---verifying system capabilities by validating human-designed input-output pairs---is an alternative evaluation method of natural language processing systems proposed to address the shortcomings of the standard approach: computing metrics on held-out data. While behavioural tests capture human prior knowledge and insights, there has been little exploration on how to leverage them for model training and development. With this in mind, we explore behaviour-aware learning by examining several fine-tuning schemes using HateCheck, a suite of functional tests for hate speech detection systems. To address potential pitfalls of training on data originally intended for evaluation, we train and evaluate models on different configurations of HateCheck by holding out categories of test cases, which enables us to estimate performance on potentially overlooked system properties. The fine-tuning procedure led to improvements in the classification accuracy of held-out functionalities and identity groups, suggesting that models can potentially generalise to overlooked functionalities. However, performance on held-out functionality classes and i.i.d. hate speech detection data decreased, which indicates that generalisation occurs mostly across functionalities from the same class and that the procedure led to overfitting to the HateCheck data distribution.

Checking HateCheck: a cross-functional analysis of behaviour-aware learning for hate speech detection

Large-scale pre-trained language models have shown remarkable results in diverse NLP applications. Unfortunately, these performance gains have been accompanied by a significant increase in computation time and model size, stressing the need to develop new or complementary strategies to increase the efficiency of these models. In this paper we propose DACT-BERT, a differentiable adaptive computation time strategy for BERT-like models. DACT-BERT adds an adaptive computational mechanism to BERT's regular processing pipeline, which controls the number of Transformer blocks that need to be executed at inference time. By doing this, the model learns to combine the most appropriate intermediate representations for the task at hand. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach, when compared to the baselines, excels on a reduced computational regime and is competitive in other less restrictive ones.

DACT-BERT: Differentiable Adaptive Computation Time for an Efficient BERT Inference

Transformer-based Natural Language Processing models have become the standard for hate speech detection. However, the unconscious use of these techniques for such a critical task comes with negative consequences. Various works have demonstrated that hate speech classifiers are biased. These findings have prompted efforts to explain classifiers, mainly using attribution methods. In this paper, we provide the first benchmark study of interpretability approaches for hate speech detection. We cover four post-hoc token attribution approaches to explain the predictions of Transformer-based misogyny classifiers in English and Italian. Further, we compare generated attributions to attention analysis. We find that only two algorithms provide faithful explanations aligned with human expectations. Gradient-based methods and attention, however, show inconsistent outputs, making their value for explanations questionable for hate speech detection tasks.

Benchmarking Post-Hoc Interpretability Approaches for Transformer-based Misogyny Detection

With many real-world applications of Natural Language Processing (NLP) comprising of long texts, there has been a rise in NLP benchmarks that measure the accuracy of models that can handle longer input sequences. However, these benchmarks do not consider the trade-offs between accuracy, speed, and power consumption as input sizes or model sizes are varied. In this work, we perform a systematic study of this accuracy vs. efficiency trade-off on two widely used long-sequence models - Longformer-Encoder-Decoder (LED) and Big Bird - during fine-tuning and inference on four datasets from the SCROLLS benchmark. To study how this trade-off differs across hyperparameter settings, we compare the models across four sequence lengths (1024, 2048, 3072, 4096) and two model sizes (base and large) under a fixed resource budget. We find that LED consistently achieves better accuracy at lower energy costs than Big Bird. For summarization, we find that increasing model size is more energy efficient than increasing sequence length for higher accuracy. However, this comes at the cost of a large drop in inference speed. For question answering, we find that smaller models are both more efficient and more accurate due to the larger training batch sizes possible under a fixed resource budget.

Characterizing the Efficiency vs. Accuracy Trade-off for Long-Context NLP Models

This papers aims at improving spoken language modeling (LM) using very large amount of automatically transcribed speech. We leverage the INA (French National Audiovisual Institute) collection and obtain 19GB of text after applying ASR on 350,000 hours of diverse TV shows. From this, spoken language models are trained either by fine-tuning an existing LM (FlauBERT) or through training a LM from scratch.
The new models (FlauBERT-Oral) will be shared with the community and are evaluated not only in terms of word prediction accuracy but also for two downstream tasks : classification of TV shows and syntactic parsing of speech. Experimental results show that FlauBERT-Oral is better than its initial FlauBERT version demonstrating that, despite its inherent noisy nature, ASR-Generated text can be useful to improve spoken language modeling.

Using ASR-Generated Text for Spoken Language Modeling

Evaluating bias, fairness, and social impact in monolingual language models is a difficult task. This challenge is further compounded when language modeling occurs in a multilingual context. Considering the implication of evaluation biases for large multilingual language models, we situate the discussion of bias evaluation within a wider context of social scientific research with computational work.
We highlight three dimensions of developing multilingual bias evaluation frameworks: (1) increasing transparency through documentation, (2) expanding targets of bias beyond gender, and (3) addressing cultural differences that exist between languages.
We further discuss the power dynamics and consequences of training large language models and recommend that researchers remain cognizant of the ramifications of developing such technologies.

You reap what you sow: On the Challenges of Bias Evaluation Under Multilingual Settings

The maturity level of language models is now at a stage in which many companies rely on them to solve various tasks. However, while research has shown how biased and harmful these models are, systematic ways of integrating social bias tests into development pipelines are still lacking. This short paper suggests how to use these verification techniques in development pipelines. We take inspiration from software testing and suggest addressing social bias evaluation as software testing. We hope to open a discussion on the best methodologies to handle social bias testing in language models.

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Why only Micro-F1? Class Weighting of Measures for Relation Classification

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