United States

There has been a recent wave of work assessing the fairness of machine learning models in general, and more specifically, on natural language processing (NLP) models built using machine learning techniques. 
While much work has highlighted biases embedded in state-of-the-art language models, and more recent efforts have focused on how to debias, research assessing the fairness and performance of biased/debiased models on downstream prediction tasks has been limited. 
Moreover, most prior work has emphasized bias along a single dimension such as gender or race. 
In this work, we benchmark multiple NLP models with regards to their fairness and predictive performance across a variety of NLP tasks. 
In particular, we assess intersectional bias - fairness across multiple demographic dimensions. 
The results show that while current debiasing strategies fare well in terms of the fairness-accuracy trade-off (generally preserving predictive power in debiased models), they are unable to effectively alleviate bias in downstream tasks. 
Furthermore, this bias is often amplified across demographic dimensions. We conclude with implications for future NLP debiasing research.

NAACL 2022

Benchmarking Intersectional Biases in NLP

# 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. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Mini Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlBKl0wzmlVF1oCeMQl3BahLd9nLP5Ce/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Posters and Demo guides**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UucMAoCNncIOaH1rMMDa0owuG9qgvJTG/view?usp=sharing)

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). 

technical paper

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
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, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 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 and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

The perceived toxicity of language can vary based on someone's identity and beliefs, but this variation is often ignored when collecting toxic language datasets, resulting in dataset and model biases. We seek to understand the who, why, and what behind biases in toxicity annotations. In two online studies with demographically and politically diverse participants, we investigate the effect of annotator identities (who) and beliefs (why), drawing from social psychology research about hate speech, free speech, racist beliefs, political leaning, and more. We disentangle what is annotated as toxic by considering posts with three characteristics: anti-Black language, African American English (AAE) dialect, and vulgarity. Our results show strong associations between annotator identity and beliefs and their ratings of toxicity. Notably, more conservative annotators and those who scored highly on our scale for racist beliefs were less likely to rate anti-Black language as toxic, but more likely to rate AAE as toxic. We additionally present a case study illustrating how a popular toxicity detection system's ratings inherently reflect only specific beliefs and perspectives. Our findings call for contextualizing toxicity labels in social variables, which raises immense implications for toxic language annotation and detection.


Annotators with Attitudes: How Annotator Beliefs And Identities Bias Toxic Language Detection

Avoiding to rely on dataset artifacts to predict hate speech is at the cornerstone of robust and fair hate speech detection. In this paper we critically analyze lexical biases in hate speech detection via a cross-platform study, disentangling various types of spurious and authentic artifacts and analyzing their impact on out-of-distribution fairness and robustness. We experiment with existing approaches and propose simple yet surprisingly effective data-centric baselines. Our results on English data across four platforms show that distinct spurious artifacts require different treatments to ultimately attain both robustness and fairness in hate speech detection. To encourage research in this direction, we release all baseline models and the code to compute artifacts, pointing it out as a complementary and necessary addition to the data statements practice.

Features or Spurious Artifacts? Data-centric Baselines for Fair and Robust Hate Speech Detection

We present FREDo, a few-shot document-level relation extraction (FSDLRE) benchmark. As opposed to existing benchmarks which are built on sentence-level relation extraction corpora, we argue that document-level corpora provide more realism, particularly regarding none-of-the-above (NOTA) distributions. Therefore, we propose a set of FSDLRE tasks and construct a benchmark based on two existing supervised learning data sets, DocRED and sciERC. We adapt the state-of-the-art sentence-level method MNAV to the document-level and develop it further for improved domain adaptation. We find FSDLRE to be a challenging setting with interesting new characteristics such as the ability to sample NOTA instances from the support set. The data, code, and trained models are available online (https://github.com/nicpopovic/FREDo).

Few-Shot Document-Level Relation Extraction

Event trigger detection, entity mention recognition, event argument extraction, and relation extraction are the four important tasks in information extraction that have been performed jointly (Joint Information Extraction - JointIE) to avoid error propagation and leverage dependencies between the task instances (i.e., event triggers, entity mentions, relations, and event arguments). However, previous JointIE models often assume heuristic manually-designed dependency between the task instances and mean-field factorization for the joint distribution of instance labels, thus unable to capture optimal dependencies among instances and labels to improve representation learning and IE performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose to induce a dependency graph among task instances from data to boost representation learning. To better capture dependencies between instance labels, we propose to directly estimate their joint distribution via Conditional Random Fields. Noise Contrastive Estimation is introduced to address the maximization of the intractable joint likelihood for model training. Finally, to improve the decoding with greedy or beam search in prior work, we present Simulated Annealing to better find the globally optimal assignment for instance labels at decoding time. Experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms previous models on multiple IE tasks across 5 datasets and 2 languages.

Joint Extraction of Entities, Relations, and Events via Modeling Inter-Instance and Inter-Label Dependencies

We focus on creating agents that act in alignment with socially beneficial norms and values in interactive narratives or text-based games -- environments wherein an agent perceives and interacts with a world through natural language. Such interactive agents are often trained via reinforcement learning to optimize task performance, even when such rewards may lead to agent behaviors that violate societal norms -- causing harm either to the agent itself or other entities in the environment. Social value alignment refers to creating agents whose behaviors conform to expected moral and social norms for a given context and group of people -- in our case, it means agents that behave in a manner that is less harmful and more beneficial for themselves and others.
We build on the Jiminy Cricket benchmark (Hendrycks et al. 2021), a set of 25 annotated interactive narratives containing thousands of morally salient scenarios covering everything from theft and bodily harm to altruism. We introduce the GALAD (Game-value ALignment through Action Distillation) agent that uses the social commonsense knowledge present in specially trained language models to contextually restrict its action space to only those actions that are aligned with socially beneficial values. An experimental study shows that the GALAD agent makes decisions efficiently enough to improve state-of-the-art task performance by 4% while reducing the frequency of socially harmful behaviors by 25% compared to strong contemporary value alignment approaches.

Aligning to Social Norms and Values in Interactive Narratives

Users write to-dos as personal notes to themselves, about things they need to complete, remember or organize. To-do texts are usually short and under-specified, which poses a challenge for current text representation models. Yet, understanding and representing their meaning is the first step towards providing intelligent assistance for to-do management. We address this problem by proposing a neural multi-task learning framework, LITE, which extracts representations of to-do tasks with a multi-head attention mechanism on top of a pre-trained text encoder. To adapt representation models to to-do texts, we collect weak-supervision labels from semantically rich external resources (e.g., dynamic common-sense knowledge base), following the principle that to-do tasks with similar intents have similar labels. We then train the model on multiple generative/predictive training objectives jointly. We evaluate our representation model on five downstream tasks and show that our approach consistently improves performance over baseline models, achieving an error reduction of up to 38.7%.

LITE: Intent-based Task Representation Learning Using Weak Supervision

Emotions are an inherent part of human interactions, and consequently, it is imperative to develop AI systems that understand and recognize human emotions. During a conversation involving various people, a person’s emotions are influenced by the other speaker’s utterances and their own emotional state over the utterances. In this paper, we propose COntextualized Graph Neural Network based Multi- modal Emotion recognitioN (COGMEN) system that leverages local information (i.e., inter/intra dependency between speakers) and global information (context). The proposed model uses Graph Neural Network (GNN) based architecture to model the complex dependencies (local and global information) in a conversation. Our model gives state-of-the- art (SOTA) results on IEMOCAP and MOSEI datasets, and detailed ablation experiments show the importance of modeling information at both levels.

COGMEN: COntextualized GNN based Multimodal Emotion recognitioN

In this work, we study Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) in a challenging self-supervised approach. One of the difficulties is how to learn task discrimination in the absence of target labels. Unlike previous literature which directly aligns cross-domain distributions or leverages reverse gradient, we propose Domain Confused Contrastive Learning (DCCL) to bridge the source and the target domains via domain puzzles, and retain discriminative representations after adaptation. Technically, DCCL searches for a most domain-challenging direction and exquisitely crafts domain confused augmentations as positive pairs, then it contrastively encourages the model to pull representations towards the other domain, thus learning more stable and effective domain invariances. We also investigate whether contrastive learning necessarily helps with UDA when performing other data augmentations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DCCL significantly outperforms baselines.

Domain Confused Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

In the context of data labeling, NLP researchers are increasingly interested in having humans select rationales, a subset of input tokens relevant to the chosen label. We conducted a 332-participant online user study to understand how humans select rationales, especially how different instructions and user interface affordances impact the rationales chosen. Participants labeled ten movie reviews as positive or negative, selecting words and phrases supporting their label as rationales. We varied the instructions given, the rationale-selection task, and the user interface. Participants often selected about 12\% of input tokens as rationales, but selected fewer if unable to drag over multiple tokens at once. Whereas participants were near unanimous in their data labels, they were far less consistent in their rationales. The user interface affordances and task greatly impacted the types of rationales chosen. We also observed large variance across participants.

Explaining Why: How Instructions and User Interfaces Impact Annotator Rationales When Labeling Text Data

In this paper, we define the task of gender rewriting in contexts involving two users (I and/or You) – first and second grammatical persons with independent grammatical gender preferences. We focus on Arabic, a gender-marking morphologically rich language. We develop a multi-step system that combines the positive aspects of both rule-based and neural rewriting models. Our results successfully demonstrate the viability of this approach on a recently created corpus for Arabic gender rewriting, achieving 88.42 M2 F0.5 on a blind test set. Our proposed system improves over previous work on the first-person-only version of this task, by 3.05 absolute increase in M2 F0.5. We demonstrate a use case of our gender rewriting system by using it to post-edit the output of a commercial MT system to provide personalized outputs based on the users’ grammatical gender preferences. We make our code, data, and pretrained models publicly available.

Benchmarking Intersectional Biases in NLP

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Annotators with Attitudes: How Annotator Beliefs And Identities Bias Toxic Language Detection

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Benchmarking Intersectional Biases in NLP

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Next from NAACL 2022

Annotators with Attitudes: How Annotator Beliefs And Identities Bias Toxic Language Detection

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Measuring Harmful Sentence Completion in Language Models for LGBTQIA+ Individuals

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

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CONFERENCES

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RESOURCES

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