Korea, Republic of

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable performance gains across numerous downstream tasks in natural language understanding. Various Chinese PLMs have been successively proposed for learning better Chinese language representation. However, most current models use Chi- nese characters as inputs and are not able to encode semantic information contained in Chinese words. While recent pre-trained models incorporate both words and characters simultaneously, they usually suffer from deficient semantic interactions and fail to capture the semantic relation between words and characters. To address the above issues, we propose a simple yet effective PLM CLOWER, which adopts the Contrastive Learning Over Word and charactER representations. In particular, CLOWER im- plicitly encodes the coarse- grained information (i.e., words) into the fine-grained representations (i.e., characters) through contrastive learning on multi-grained information. CLOWER is of great value in realistic scenarios since it can be easily incorporated into any existing fine-grained based PLMs without modifying the production pipelines. Extensive experiments conducted on a range of downstream tasks demonstrate the superior performance of CLOWER over several state-of-the-art baselines.

COLING 2022

CLOWER: A Pre-trained Language Model with Contrastive Learning over Word and Character Representations

contrastive learning and multi-grained information

pre-trained language model

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

As in previous years, the program of the conference includes a poster session, tutorials, workshops and demonstrations in addition to the main conference.


We were able to keep the registration fees similar to those charged for the virtual ACL 2020. The one fee allows attendance at the main conference and any/all tutorials and workshops. These fees would be $125 Regular Early and $175 Regular Late; $50 Student Early and $75 Student Late. Early registration closes at midnight July 11, 2021 (Eastern Daylight Time).

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IJCNLP-AACL 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

poster

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### 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.

We introduce a new type of problems for math word problem (MWP) solvers, named Noun-MWPs, whose answer is a non-numerical string containing a noun from the problem text. 
We present a novel method to empower existing MWP solvers to handle Noun-MWPs, and apply the method on Expression-Pointer Transformer (EPT).
Our model, N-EPT, solves Noun-MWPs significantly better than other models, and at the same time, solves conventional MWPs as well. 
Solving Noun-MWPs may lead to bridging MWP solvers and traditional question-answering NLP models.

Noun-MWP: Math Word Problems Meet Noun Answers

This paper explores the task of identifying the overall sentiment expressed towards volitional entities (persons and organizations) in a document -- what we refer to as Entity-Level Sentiment Analysis (ELSA). While identifying sentiment conveyed towards an entity is well researched for shorter texts like tweets, we find little to no research on this specific task for longer texts with multiple mentions and opinions towards the same entity. This lack of research would be understandable if ELSA can be derived from existing tasks and models. To assess this, we annotate a set of professional reviews for their overall sentiment towards each volitional entity in the text. We sample from data already annotated for document-level, sentence-level, and target-level sentiment in a multi-domain review corpus, and our results indicate that there is no single proxy task that provides this overall sentiment we seek for the entities at a satisfactory level of performance. We present a suite of experiments aiming to assess the contribution towards ELSA provided by document-, sentence-, and target-level sentiment analysis, and provide a discussion of their shortcomings. We show that sentiment in our dataset is expressed not only with an entity mention as target, but also towards targets with a sentiment-relevant relation to a volitional entity. In our data, these relations extend beyond anaphoric coreference resolution, and our findings call for further research of the topic. Finally, we also present a survey of previous relevant work.

Entity-Level Sentiment Analysis (ELSA): An exploratory task survey

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims to distinguish sentiment polarity of every specific aspect in a given sentence. Previous researches have realized the importance of interactive learning with context and aspects. However, these methods are ill-studied to learn complex sentence with multiple aspects due to overlapped polarity feature. And they do not consider the correlation between aspects to distinguish overlapped feature. In order to solve this problem, we propose a new method called Recurrent Inverse Learning Guided Network (RILGNet). Our RILGNet has two points to improve the modeling of aspect correlation and the selecting of aspect feature. First, we use Recurrent Mechanism to improve the joint representation of aspects, which enhances the aspect correlation modeling iteratively. Second, we propose Inverse Learning Guidance to improve the selection of aspect feature by considering aspect correlation, which provides more useful information to determine polarity. Experimental results on SemEval-2014 Datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of RILGNet, and we further prove that RILGNet is state-of-the-art method in multiaspect scenarios.

Modeling Aspect Correlation for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis via Recurrent Inverse Learning Guidance

Recent research shows that pre-trained language models, built to generate text conditioned on some context, learn to encode syntactic knowledge to a certain degree. This has motivated researchers to move beyond the sentence-level and look into their ability to encode less studied discourse-level phenomena. In this paper, we add to the body of probing research by investigating discourse entity representations in large pre-trained language models in English. Motivated by early theories of discourse and key pieces of previous work, we focus on the information-status of entities as discourse-new or discourse-old. We present two probing models, one based on binary classification and another one on sequence labeling. The results of our experiments show that pre-trained language models do encode information on whether an entity has been introduced before or not in the discourse. However, this information alone is not sufficient to find the entities in a discourse, opening up interesting questions about the definition of entities for future work.

New or Old? Exploring How Pre-Trained Language Models Represent Discourse Entities

When a natural language generation (NLG) component is implemented in a real-world task-oriented dialogue system, it is necessary to generate not only natural utterances as learned on training data but also utterances adapted to the dialogue environment (e.g., noise from environmental sounds) and the user (e.g., users with low levels of understanding ability). Inspired by recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) for language generation tasks, we propose ANTOR, a method for Adaptive Natural language generation for Task-Oriented dialogue via Reinforcement learning. In ANTOR, a natural language understanding (NLU) module, which corresponds to the user's understanding of system utterances, is incorporated into the objective function of RL. If the NLG's intentions are correctly conveyed to the NLU, which understands a system's utterances, the NLG is given a positive reward. We conducted experiments on the MultiWOZ dataset, and we confirmed that ANTOR could generate adaptive utterances against speech recognition errors and the different vocabulary levels of users.

Adaptive Natural Language Generation for Task-oriented Dialogue via Reinforcement Learning

Automated Essay Scoring via Pairwise Contrastive Regression

Without labeled question-answer pairs for necessary training, unsupervised commonsense question-answering (QA) appears to be extremely challenging due to its indispensable unique prerequisite on commonsense source like knowledge bases (KBs), which are usually highly resource consuming in construction. Recently pre-trained language models (PLMs) show effectiveness as an alternative for commonsense clues when they play a role of knowledge generator. However, existing work either relies on large-scale in-domain or out-of-domain labeled data, or fails to generate knowledge of high quality in a general way. Motivated by human thinking experience, we propose an approach of All-round Thinker (ArT) by fully taking association during knowledge generating. In detail, our model first focuses on key parts in the given context, and then generates highly related knowledge on such a basis in an association way like human thinking. Besides, for causal reasoning, a reverse thinking mechanism is especially added to further enhance bidirectional inferring between cause and effect. ArT is totally unsupervised and KBs-free. We evaluate it on three commonsense QA benchmarks: COPA, SocialIQA and SCT. On all scales of PLM backbones, ArT shows its brilliant performance and outperforms previous advanced unsupervised models.

ArT: All-round Thinker for Unsupervised Commonsense Question Answering

Knowledge graph embedding aims to represent entities and relations as low-dimensional vectors, which is an effective way for predicting missing links. It is crucial for knowledge graph embedding models to model and infer various relation patterns, such as symmetry/antisymmetry. However, many existing approaches fail to model semantic hierarchies, which are common in the real world. We propose a new model called HRQE, which represents entities as pure quaternions. The relational embedding consists of two parts: (a) Using unit quaternions to represent the rotation part in 3D space, where the head entities are rotated by the corresponding relations through Hamilton product. (b) Using scale parameters to constrain the modulus of entities to make them have hierarchical distributions. To the best of our knowledge, HRQE is the first model that can encode symmetry/antisymmetry, inversion, composition, multiple relation patterns and learn semantic hierarchies simultaneously. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of HRQE against some of the SOTA methods on four well-established knowledge graph completion benchmarks.

Learning Hierarchy-Aware Quaternion Knowledge Graph Embeddings with Representing Relations as 3D Rotations

Discourse parsing on multi-party dialogues is an important but difficult task in dialogue systems and conversational analysis.
It is believed that speaker interactions are helpful for this task.
However, most previous research ignores speaker interactions between different speakers.
To this end, we present a speaker-aware model for this task.
Concretely, we propose a speaker-context interaction joint encoding~(SCIJE) approach,
using the interaction features between different speakers.
In addition, we propose a second-stage pre-training task, same speaker prediction~(SSP),
enhancing the conversational context representations by predicting whether two utterances are from the same speaker.
Experiments on two standard benchmark datasets show that the proposed model achieves the best-reported performance in the literature. 
We will release the codes of this paper to facilitate future research

Speaker-Aware Discourse Parsing on Multi-Party Dialogues

Most works on computational morality focus on moral polarity recognition, i.e., distinguishing right from wrong. However, a discrete polarity label is not informative enough to reflect morality as it does not contain any degree or intensity information. Existing approaches to compute moral intensity are limited to word-level measurement and heavily rely on human labelling. In this paper, we propose MoralScore, a weakly-supervised framework that can automatically measure moral intensity from text. It only needs moral polarity labels, which are more robust and easier to acquire. Besides, the framework can capture latent moral information not only from words but also from sentence-level semantics which can provide a more comprehensive measurement. To evaluate the performance of our method, we introduce a set of evaluation metrics and conduct extensive experiments. Results show that our method achieves good performance on both automatic and human evaluations.

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CLOWER: A Pre-trained Language Model with Contrastive Learning over Word and Character Representations

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Noun-MWP: Math Word Problems Meet Noun Answers

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