Korea, Republic of

Most previous work on temporal relation extraction only focused on extracting the temporal relations among events or suffered from the issue of different expressions of events, timexes and Document Creation Time (DCT). Moreover, DCT can act as a hub to semantically connect the other events and timexes in a document. Unfortunately, previous work cannot benefit from such critical information. To address the above issues, we propose a unified DCT-centered Temporal Relation Extraction model DTRE to identify the relations among events, timexes and DCT. Specifically, sentence-style DCT representation is introduced to address the first issue and unify event expressions, timexes and DCT. Then, a DCT-aware graph is applied to obtain their contextual structural representations. Furthermore, a DCT-anchoring multi-task learning framework is proposed to jointly predict three types of temporal relations in a batch. Finally, we apply a DCT-guided global inference to further enhance the global consistency among different relations. Experimental results on three datasets show that our DTRE outperforms several SOTA baselines on E-E, E-T and E-D significantly.

COLING 2022

DCT-Centered Temporal Relation Extraction

temporal relation extraction

graph neural network

multi-task learning

[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/81a3c0317d24f663b49b996875024d45.png)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2022.coling-1/)



### THE CONFERENCE WE KNOW AND WE WANT.
**COLING**, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

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 including tech-startups. COLING provides opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting discovery.

In fall of 2022, COLING will be held in Gyeongju in a hybrid format. All participants can either present at the venue site or join virtually. As more people get vaccinated, we are happy to provide safer environments for our colleagues. We believe that COLING 2022 will be one of the conferences, free from the pandemic. The hybrid format gives presenters and sponsors a valuable opportunity to promote their companies in both an online and in-person venue. For the first time in a long time, customers can interact with their sponsor's products first-hand. The online venue, too, gives sponsors the chance to network with those unable to attend the in-person session.

The hybrid format ultimately lends itself to greater exposure for our sponsors: COLING2022 will let you reach more potential partners and customers than ever before!<br><br><br>

To gain access to this event page you are required to register.<br> Find more information and pay the registration fee on event the organizer’s website **[https://coling2022.org/reg](https://coling2022.org/reg)**

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

technical paper

Debiasing word embeddings has been largely limited to individual and independent social categories. However, real-world corpora typically present multiple social categories that possibly correlate or intersect with each other. For instance, “hair weaves” is stereotypically associated with African American females, but neither African American nor females alone. Therefore, this work studies biases associated with multiple social categories: joint biases induced by the union of different categories and intersectional biases that do not overlap with the biases of the constituent categories. We first empirically observe that individual biases intersect non-trivially (i.e., over a one-dimensional subspace). Drawing from the intersectional
theory in social science and the linguistic theory, we then construct an intersectional
subspace to debias for multiple social categories using the nonlinear geometry of individual biases. Empirical evaluations corroborate the efficacy of our approach.

Debiasing Word Embeddings with Nonlinear Geometry

Quotation extraction aims to extract quotations from written text. There are three components in a quotation: source refers to the holder of the quotation, cue is the trigger word(s), and content is the main body. Existing solutions for quotation extraction mainly utilize rule-based approaches and sequence labeling models. While rule-based approaches often lead to low recalls, sequence labeling models cannot well handle quotations with complicated structures. In this paper, we propose the Context and Former-Label Enhanced Net (CofeNet) for quotation extraction. CofeNet is able to extract complicated quotations with components of variable lengths and complicated structures. On two public datasets (i.e., PolNeAR and Riqua) and one proprietary dataset (i.e., PoliticsZH), we show that our CofeNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on complicated quotation extraction.

CofeNet: Context and Former-Label Enhanced Net for Complicated Quotation Extraction

Current text mining models are trained with 0-1 hard label that indicates whether an instance belongs to a class, ignoring rich information of the relevance degree. Soft label, which involved each label of more varying degrees than the hard label, is considered more suitable for describing instances. The process of generating soft labels from hard labels is defined as label smoothing (LS).
Classical LS methods focus on universal data mining tasks so that they ignore the valuable text features in text mining tasks.
This paper presents a novel keyword-based LS method to automatically generate soft labels from hard labels via exploiting the relevance between labels and text instances.
Generated soft labels are then incorporated into existing models as auxiliary targets during the training stage, capable of improving models without adding any extra parameters.
Results of extensive experiments on text classification and large-scale text retrieval datasets demonstrate that soft labels generated by our method contain rich knowledge of text features, improving the performance of corresponding models under both balanced and unbalanced settings.

Label Smoothing for Text Mining

As political attitudes have diverged ideologically in the United States, political speech has diverged linguistically. The ever-widening polarization between the US political parties is accelerated by an erosion of mutual understanding between them. We aim to make these communities more comprehensible to each other with a framework that probes community-specific responses to the same survey questions using community language models (COMMUNITYLM). In our framework we identify committed partisan members for each community on Twitter and fine-tune LMs on the tweets authored by them. We then assess the worldviews of the two groups using prompt-based probing of their corresponding LMs, with prompts that elicit opinions about public figures and groups surveyed by the American National Election Studies (ANES) 2020 Exploratory Testing Survey. We compare the responses generated by the LMs to the ANES survey results, and find a level of alignment that greatly exceeds several baseline methods. Our work aims to show that we can use community LMs to query the worldview of any group of people given a sufficiently large sample of their social media discussions or media diet.

CommunityLM: Probing Partisan Worldviews from Language Models

Most NER methods rely on extensive labeled data for model training, which struggles in the low-resource scenarios with limited training data. Existing dominant approaches usually suffer from the challenge that the target domain has different label sets compared with a resource-rich source domain, which can be concluded as class transfer and domain transfer. In this paper, we propose a lightweight tuning paradigm for low-resource NER via pluggable prompting (LightNER). Specifically, we construct the unified learnable verbalizer of entity categories to generate the entity span sequence and entity categories without any label-specific classifiers, thus addressing the class transfer issue. We further propose a pluggable guidance module by incorporating learnable parameters into the self-attention layer as guidance, which can re-modulate the attention and adapt pre-trained weights. Note that we only tune those inserted module with the whole parameter of the pre-trained language model fixed, thus, making our approach lightweight and flexible for low-resource scenarios and can better transfer knowledge across domains. Experimental results show that LightNER can obtain comparable performance in the standard supervised setting and outperform strong baselines in low-resource settings.

LightNER: A Lightweight Tuning Paradigm for Low-resource NER via Pluggable Prompting

We propose Neuro-Symbolic Visual Dialog (NSVD) -the first method to combine deep learning and symbolic program execution for multi-round visually-grounded reasoning. NSVD significantly outperforms existing purely-connectionist methods on two key challenges inherent to visual dialog: long-distance co-reference resolution as well as vanishing question-answering performance. We demonstrate the latter by proposing a more realistic and stricter evaluation scheme in which we use predicted answers for the full dialog history when calculating accuracy. We describe two variants of our model and show that using this new scheme, our best model achieves an accuracy of 99.72% on CLEVR-Dialog -a relative improvement of more than 10% over the state of the art while only requiring a fraction of training data. Moreover, we demonstrate that our neuro-symbolic models have a higher mean first failure round, are more robust against incomplete dialog histories, and generalize better not only to dialogs that are up to three times longer than those seen during training but also to unseen question types and scenes.

Neuro-Symbolic Visual Dialog

Hierarchical Text Classification (HTC), which aims to predict text labels organized in hierarchical space, is a significant task lacking in investigation in natural language processing. Existing methods usually encode the entire hierarchical structure and fail to construct a robust label-dependent model, making it hard to make accurate predictions on sparse lower-level labels and achieving low Macro-F1. In this paper, we explore the level dependency and path dependency of the label hierarchy in a generative way for building the knowledge of upper-level labels of current path into lower-level ones, and thus propose a novel PAAM-HiA-T5 model for HTC: a hierarchy-aware T5 model with pathadaptive attention mechanism. Specifically, we generate a multi-level sequential label structure to exploit hierarchical dependency across different levels with Breadth-First Search (BFS) and T5 model. To further improve label dependency prediction within each path, we then propose an original path-adaptive attention mechanism (PAAM) to lead the model to adaptively focus on the path where the currently generated label is located, shielding the noise from other paths. Comprehensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that PAAM-HiA-T5 greatly outperforms all state-of-the-art HTC approaches especially in Macro-F1.


Exploring Label Hierarchy in a Generative Way for Hierarchical Text Classification

CILDA: Contrastive Data Augmentation using Intermediate Layer Knowledge Distillation

Cross-domain named entity recognition aims to improve performance in a target domain with shared knowledge from a well-studied source domain.The previous sequence-labeling based method focuses on promoting model parameter sharing among domains. However, such a paradigm essentially ignores the domain-specific information and suffers from entity type conflicts. To address these issues, we propose a novel machine reading comprehension based framework, named DoSEA, which can identify domain-specific semantic differences and mitigate the subtype conflicts between domains. Concretely, we introduce an entity existence discrimination task and an entity-aware training setting, to recognize inconsistent entity annotations in the source domain and bring additional reference to better share information across domains. Experiments on six datasets prove the effectiveness of our DoSEA.

DoSEA: A Domain-specific Entity-aware Framework for Cross-Domain Named Entity Recogition

In recent years, data augmentation has become an important field of machine learning. While images can use simple techniques such as cropping or rotating, textual data augmentation needs more complex manipulations to ensure that the generated examples are useful. Variational auto-encoders (VAE) and its conditional variant the Conditional-VAE (CVAE) are often used to generate new textual data, both relying on a good enough training of the generator so that it doesn't create examples of the wrong class. In this paper, we explore a simpler way to use VAE for data augmentation: the training of one VAE per class. We show on several dataset sizes, as well as on four different binary classification tasks, that it outperforms other generative data augmentation techniques.

DCT-Centered Temporal Relation Extraction

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Debiasing Word Embeddings with Nonlinear Geometry

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