Korea, Republic of

Though existing researches have achieved impressive results in controlled text generation, they focus mainly on single-attribute control. However, in applications like automatic comments, the topic and sentiment need to be controlled simultaneously. In this work, we propose a new framework for multi-attribute controlled text generation. To achieve this, we design a contrastive-generator that can effectively generate texts with more attributes. In order to increase the convergence of the text on the desired attributes, we adopt an external-discriminator to distinguish whether the generated text holds the desired attributes. Moreover, we propose top-n weighted decoding to further improve the relevance of texts to attributes. Automated evaluations and human evaluations show that our framework achieves remarkable controllability in multi-attribute generation while keeping the text fluent and diverse. It also yields promising performance on zero-shot generation.

COLING 2022

Multi-Attribute Controlled Text Generation with Contrastive-Generator and External-Discriminator

zero-shot generation

contrastive-generator

multi-attribute controlled text generation

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

poster

[![](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.

Unsupervised summarization methods have achieved remarkable results by incorporating representations from pre-trained language models. However, existing methods fail to consider efficiency and effectiveness at the same time
when the input document is extremely long. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we proposed an efficient Coarse-to-Fine Facet-Aware Ranking (C2F-FAR) framework for unsupervised long document summarization, which is based on the semantic block. The semantic block refers to continuous sentences in the document that describe the same facet. Specifically, we address this problem by converting the one-step ranking method into the hierarchical multi-granularity two-stage ranking. In the coarse-level stage, we propose a new segment algorithm to split the document into facetaware semantic blocks and then filter insignificant blocks. In the fine-level stage, we select salient sentences in each block and then extract
the final summary from selected sentences. We evaluate our framework on four long document summarization datasets: Gov-Report, BillSum, arXiv, and PubMed. Our C2F-FAR can achieve new state-of-the-art unsupervised summarization results on Gov-Report and BillSum. In addition, our method speeds up 4-28 times more than previous methods

An Efficient Coarse-to-Fine Facet-Aware Unsupervised Summarization Framework based on Semantic Blocks

Prerecorded laughter accompanying dialog in comedy TV shows encourages the audience to laugh by clearly marking humorous moments in the show. We present an approach for automatically detecting humor in the \textit{Friends} TV show using multimodal data. Our model is capable of recognizing whether an utterance is humorous or not and assess the intensity of it. We use the prerecorded laughter in the show as annotation as it marks humor and the length of the audience's laughter tells us how funny a given joke is. We evaluate the model on episodes the model has not been exposed to during the training phase. Our results show that the model is capable of correctly detecting whether an utterance is humorous 78\% of the time and how long the audience's laughter reaction should last with a mean absolute error of 600 milliseconds.

When to Laugh and How Hard? A Multimodal Approach to Detecting Humor and its Intensity

Text classification is a primary task in natural language processing (NLP). Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have developed rapidly and been applied to text classification tasks. As a special kind of graph data, the tree has a simpler data structure and can provide rich hierarchical information for text classification. Inspired by the structural entropy, we construct the coding tree of the graph by minimizing the structural entropy and propose HINT, which aims to make full use of the hierarchical information contained in the text for the task of text classification. Specifically, we first establish a dependency parsing graph for each text. Then we designed a structural entropy minimization algorithm to decode the key information in the graph and convert each graph to its corresponding coding tree. Based on the hierarchical structure of the coding tree, the representation of the entire graph is obtained by updating the representation of non-leaf nodes in the coding tree layer by layer. Finally, we present the effectiveness of hierarchical information in text classification. Experimental results show that HINT outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on popular benchmarks while having a simple structure and few parameters.

Hierarchical information matters: Text classification via tree based graph neural network

Fine-grained entity typing (FET) aims to deduce specific semantic types of the entity mentions in text. Modern methods for FET mainly focus on learning what a certain type looks like. And few works directly model the type differences, that is, let models know the extent that one type is different from others. To alleviate this problem, we propose a type-enriched hierarchical contrastive strategy for FET. Our method can directly model the differences between hierarchical types and improve the ability to distinguish multi-grained similar types. On the one hand, we embed type into entity contexts to make type information directly perceptible. On the other hand, we design a constrained contrastive strategy on the hierarchical structure to directly model the type differences, which can simultaneously perceive the distinguishability between types at different granularity. Experimental results on three benchmarks, BBN, OntoNotes, and FIGER show that our method achieves significant performance on FET by effectively modeling type differences.

Type-enriched Hierarchical Contrastive Strategy for Fine-Grained Entity Typing

Nowadays, transformer-based models gradually become the default choice for artificial intelligence pioneers. The models also show superiority even in the few-shot scenarios. In this paper, we revisit the classical methods and propose a new few-shot alternative. Specifically, we investigate the few-shot one-class problem, which actually takes a known sample as a reference to detect whether an unknown instance belongs to the same class. This problem can be studied from the perspective of sequence match. It is shown that with meta-learning, the classical sequence match method, i.e. Compare-Aggregate, significantly outperforms transformer ones. The classical approach requires much less training cost. Furthermore, we perform an empirical comparison between two kinds of sequence match approaches under simple fine-tuning and meta-learning. Meta-learning causes the transformer models' features to have high-correlation dimensions. The reason is closely related to the number of layers and heads of transformer models. Experimental codes and data are available at \url{https://github.com/hmt2014/FewOne}.

Classical Sequence Match is a Competitive Few-Shot One-Class Learner

A recent success in semantic dependency parsing shows that graph neural networks can make significant accuracy improvements, owing to its powerful ability in learning expressive graph representations.
However, this work learns graph representations based on a static graph constructed by an existing parser, suffering from two drawbacks: (1) the static graph might be error-prone (e.g., noisy or incomplete), and (2) graph construction stage and graph representation learning stage are disjoint, the errors introduced in the graph construction stage cannot be corrected and might be accumulated to later stages.
To address these two drawbacks, we propose a dynamic graph learning framework and apply it to semantic dependency parsing, for jointly learning graph structure and graph representations.
Experimental results show that our parser outperforms the previous parsers on the SemEval-2015 Task 18 dataset in three languages (English, Chinese, and Czech).

DynGL-SDP: Dynamic Graph Learning for Semantic Dependency Parsing

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have been applied in NLP tasks and achieve promising results. Nevertheless, the fine-tuning procedure needs labeled data of the target domain, making it difficult to learn in low-resource and non-trivial labeled scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose Prompt-based Text Entailment (PTE) for low-resource named entity recognition, which better leverages knowledge in the PLMs. We first reformulate named entity recognition as the text entailment task. The original sentence with entity type-specific prompts is fed into PLMs to get entailment scores for each candidate. The entity type with the top score is then selected as final label. Then, we inject tagging labels into prompts and treat words as basic units instead of n-gram spans to reduce time complexity in generating candidates by n-grams enumeration. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method PTE achieves competitive performance on the CoNLL03 dataset, and better than fine-tuned counterparts on the MIT Movie and Few-NERD dataset in low-resource settings.

Prompt-based Text Entailment for Low-Resource Named Entity Recognition

We leverage cross-language data expansion and retraining to enhance neural Event Detection (abbr., ED) on the English ACE corpus. Machine translation is utilized for expanding the English training set of ED from that of Chinese. However, experimental results illustrate that such strategy actually results in performance degradation. The survey of translations suggests that the mistakenly-aligned triggers in the expanded data negatively influence the retraining process. We refer this phenomenon to “trigger falsification”. To overcome the issue, we apply heuristic rules for regulating the expanded data and fixing the distracting samples that contain the
falsified triggers. The supplementary experiments show that the rule-based regulation is beneficial, yielding the improvement of about 1.6% F1 score for ED. We additionally prove that, instead of transfer learning from the translated ED data, the straight data combination by random pouring surprisingly performs better.

Unregulated Chinese-to-English Data Expansion Does NOT Work for Neural Event Detection

Emotion-cause pair extraction (ECPE) is an emerging task in emotion cause analysis, which extracts potential emotion-cause pairs from an emotional document. Most recent studies use end-to-end methods to tackle the ECPE task. However, these methods either suffer from a label sparsity problem or fail to model complicated relations between emotions and causes. Furthermore, they all do not consider explicit semantic information of clauses. To this end, we transform the ECPE task into a document-level machine reading comprehension (MRC) task and propose a Multi-turn MRC framework with Rethink mechanism (MM-R). Our framework can model complicated relations between emotions and causes while avoiding generating the pairing matrix (the leading cause of the label sparsity problem). Besides, the multi-turn structure can fuse explicit semantic information flow between emotions and causes. Extensive experiments on the benchmark emotion cause corpus demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, which outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

A Multi-turn Machine Reading Comprehension Framework with Rethink Mechanism for Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction

Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based models have proven effective in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks in recent years. Specifically, in the case of the Extractive Document Summarization (EDS) task, modeling documents under graph structure is able to analyze the complex relations between semantic units (e.g., word-to-word, word-to-sentence, sentence-to-sentence) and enrich valuable information for the sentence representation. However, long-form document summarization using graph-based approaches is still an open research issue. The main challenge is to represent long documents in a graph structure in an effective way. In this regard, this paper proposes a new heterogeneous graph neural network (HeterGNN) model to improve the performance of long document summarization (HeterGraphLongSum). Specifically, the main idea is to add the passage nodes into the heterogeneous graph structure of word and sentence nodes for enriching the final representation of sentences. In this regard, HeterGraphLongSum includes three types of semantic units such as word, sentence, and passage. Experiments on two benchmark datasets for long documents such as Pubmed and Arxiv indicate promising results of the proposed model for the extractive long document summarization problem. Especially, HeterGraphLongSum is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance without relying on any pre-trained language models (e.g., BERT). The source code is available for further exploitation on the Github\footnote{https://github.com/tuananhphan97vn/HeterGraphLongSum}.

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Multi-Attribute Controlled Text Generation with Contrastive-Generator and External-Discriminator

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An Efficient Coarse-to-Fine Facet-Aware Unsupervised Summarization Framework based on Semantic Blocks

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