Korea, Republic of

Event argument extraction (EAE) aims to extract arguments with given roles from texts, which have been widely studied in natural language processing. Most previous works have achieved good performance in specific EAE datasets with dedicated neural architectures. Whereas, these architectures are usually difficult to adapt to new datasets/scenarios with various annotation schemas or formats. Furthermore, they rely on large-scale labeled data for training, which is unavailable due to the high labelling cost in most cases. In this paper, we propose a multi-format transfer learning model with variational information bottleneck, which makes use of the information especially the common knowledge in existing datasets for EAE in new datasets. Specifically, we introduce a shared-specific prompt framework to learn both format-shared and format-specific knowledge from datasets with different formats. In order to further absorb the common knowledge for EAE and eliminate the irrelevant noise, we integrate variational information bottleneck into our architecture to refine the shared representation. We conduct extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, and obtain new state-of-the-art performance on EAE.

COLING 2022

A Multi-Format Transfer Learning Model for Event Argument Extraction via Variational Information Bottleneck

event argument extraction; transfer learning; information bottleneck

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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Registered attendees will receive access the week of November 1st.

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.

technical paper

[![](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.

Relational web-tables are significant sources of structural information that are widely used for relation extraction and population of facts into knowledge graphs. To transform the webtable data into knowledge, we need to identify the relations that exist between column pairs. Currently, there are only a handful of publicly available datasets with relations annotated against natural web-tables. Most datasets are constructed using synthetic tables that lack valuable metadata information, or are limited in size to be considered as a challenging evaluation set. In this paper, we present REDTab, the largest natural-table relation extraction dataset. We have annotated ~9K tables and ~22K column pairs using crowd sourced annotators from MTurk, which has 50x larger number of column pairs than the existing human-annotated benchmark. Our test set is specially designed to be challenging as observed in our experiment results using TaBERT.

A Relation Extraction Dataset for Knowledge Extraction from Web Tables

As AI is more and more pervasive in everyday life, humans have an increasing demand to understand its behavior and decisions. Most research on explainable AI builds on the premise that there is one ideal explanation to be found. In fact, however, everyday explanations are co-constructed in a dialogue between the person explaining (the explainer) and the specific person being explained to (the explainee). In this paper, we introduce a first corpus of dialogical explanations to enable NLP research on how humans explain as well as on how AI can learn to imitate this process. The corpus consists of 65 transcribed English dialogues from the Wired video series 5 Levels, explaining 13 topics to five explainees of different proficiency. All 1550 dialogue turns have been manually labeled by five independent professionals for the topic discussed as well as for the dialogue act and the explanation move performed. We analyze linguistic patterns of explainers and explainees, and we explore differences across proficiency levels. BERT-based baseline results indicate that sequence information helps predicting topics, acts, and moves effectively.

"Mama Always Had a Way of Explaining Things So I Could Understand": A Dialogue Corpus for Learning to Construct Explanations

In contrast to traditional exhaustive search, selective search first clusters documents into several groups before all the documents are searched exhaustively by a query, to limit the search executed within one group or only a few groups. Selective search is designed to reduce the latency and computation in modern large-scale search systems. In this study, we propose MICO, a \textbf{M}utual \textbf{I}nformation \textbf{CO}-training framework for selective search with minimal supervision using the search logs. After training, MICO does not only cluster the documents, but also routes unseen queries to the relevant clusters for efficient retrieval. In our empirical experiments, MICO significantly improves the performance on multiple metrics of selective search and outperforms a number of existing competitive baselines.

MICO: Selective Search with Mutual Information Co-training

We propose a biomedical knowledge enhanced pre-trained language model for medicinal product vertical search. We present a novel pre-training task, product attribute prediction (PAP), to incorporate medicinal product knowledge into the pre-trained language model. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of PAP pre-training task for medicinal product vertical search.

A Domain Knowledge Enhanced Pre-Trained Language Model for Vertical Search: Case Study on Medicinal Products

Table-based fact verification aims to verify whether a statement sentence is trusted or fake. Most existing methods rely on graph features or data augmentation but fail to investigate evidence correlation between the statement and table effectively. We propose a self-Labeled Keypoint Alignment model to explore the correlation between the two. Specifically, a dual-view alignment module based on statement and table views is designed to discriminate the salient words through multiple interactions. A novel mixture-of-experts block is designed to integrate the interacted information for supporting the alignment and final classification. A contrastive learning loss is utilized to learn the precise representation of the structure-involved words.

Table-based fact verification with self-labeled keypoint alignment

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been recently applied in natural language processing. Various GNN research studies are proposed to learn node interactions within the local graph of each document that contains words, sentences, or topics for inductive text classification. However, most inductive GNNs that are built on a word graph generally take global word embeddings as node features, without referring to
document-wise contextual information. Consequently, we find that BERT models can perform better than inductive GNNs. An intuitive follow-up approach is to enrich GNNs with contextual embeddings from BERT, yet there is a lack of related research. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective unified model, coined ConTextING, with a joint training mechanism to learn from both document embeddings and contextual word interactions simultaneously. Our experiments show that ConTextING outperforms pure inductive GNNs and BERT-style models. The analyses also highlight the benefits of the sub-word graph and joint training with separated classifiers.

ConTextING: Granting Document-Wise Contextual Embeddings to Graph Neural Networks for Inductive Text Classification

Recent years have witnessed the proliferation of offensive content online such as fake news, propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation. While initially this was mostly about textual content, over time images and videos gained popularity, as they are much easier to consume, attract more attention, and spread further than text. As a result, researchers started leveraging different modalities and combinations thereof to tackle online multimodal offensive content. In this study, we offer a survey on the state-of-the-art on multimodal disinformation detection covering various combinations of modalities: text, images, speech, video, social media network structure, and temporal information. Moreover, while some studies focused on {\em factuality}, others investigated how harmful the content is. While these two components in the definition of disinformation -- (i) factuality, and (ii)harmfulness --, are equally important, they are typically studied in isolation. Thus, we argue for the need to tackle disinformation detection by taking into account multiple modalities as well as both factuality and harmfulness, in the same framework. Finally, we discuss current challenges and future research directions.

A Survey on Multimodal Disinformation Detection

KGE-CL: Contrastive Learning of Tensor Decomposition Based Knowledge Graph Embeddings

Recent studies show that NLP models trained on standard English texts tend to produce biased outcomes against underrepresented English varieties. In this work, we conduct a pioneering study of the English variety use of African American English (AAE) in NLI task. First, we propose CODESWITCH, a greedy unidirectional morphosyntactically-informed rule-based translation method for data augmentation. Next, we use CODESWITCH to present a preliminary study to determine if demographic language features do in fact influence models to produce false predictions. Then, we conduct experiments on two popular datasets and propose two simple, yet effective and generalizable debiasing methods. Our findings show that NLI models (e.g. BERT) trained under our proposed frameworks outperform traditional large language models while maintaining or even improving the prediction performance. In addition, we intend to release CODESWITCH, in hopes of promoting dialectal language diversity in training data to both reduce the discriminatory societal impacts and improve model robustness of downstream NLP tasks.

Evaluating and Mitigating Inherent Linguistic Bias of African American English through Inference

Natural language understanding (NLU) models tend to rely on spurious correlations (i.e., dataset bias) to achieve high performance on in-distribution datasets but poor performance on out-of-distribution ones. Most of the existing debiasing methods often identify and weaken these samples with biased features (i.e., superficial surface features that cause such spurious correlations). However, down-weighting these samples obstructs the model in learning from the non-biased parts of these samples. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we propose to eliminate spurious correlations in a fine-grained manner from a feature space perspective. Specifically, we introduce Random Fourier Features and weighted re-sampling to decorrelate the dependencies between features to mitigate spurious correlations. After obtaining decorrelated features, we further design a mutual-information-based method to purify them, which forces the model to learn features that are more relevant to tasks. Extensive experiments on two well-studied NLU tasks demonstrate that our method is superior to other comparative approaches.

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A Multi-Format Transfer Learning Model for Event Argument Extraction via Variational Information Bottleneck

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A Relation Extraction Dataset for Knowledge Extraction from Web Tables

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