Korea, Republic of

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.

COLING 2022

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

diversity

inference

ethics

fairness

bias

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

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 and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

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.

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.

Decorrelate Irrelevant, Purify Relevant: Overcome Textual Spurious Correlations from a Feature Perspective

We explore Interactive Post-Editing (IPE) models for human-in-loop translation to help correct translation errors and rephrase it with a desired style variation. We specifically study verbosity for style variations and build on top of multi-source transformers that can read source and hypothesis to improve the latter with user inputs. Token-level interaction inputs for error corrections and length interaction inputs for verbosity control are used by the model to generate a suitable translation. We report BERTScore to evaluate semantic quality with other relevant metrics for translations from English to German, French and Spanish languages. Our model achieves superior BERTScore over state-of-the-art machine translation models while maintaining the desired token-level and verbosity preference.

Interactive Post-Editing for Verbosity Controlled Translation

In this work, we focus on improving the captions generated by image-caption generation systems. We propose a novel re-ranking approach that leverages visual semantic measures to identify the ideal caption that maximally captures the visual information in the image. Our re-ranker utilizes the Belief Revision framework (Blok et al., 2003) to calibrate the original likelihood of the top-n captions by explicitly exploiting the semantic relatedness between the depicted caption and the visual context. Our experiments demonstrate the utility of our approach, where we observe that our re-ranker can enhance the performance of a typical image captioning system without the necessity of any additional training or fine-tuning.

Belief Revision based Caption Re-ranker with Visual Semantic Information

Acronym extraction is the task of identifying acronyms and their expanded forms in texts that is necessary for various NLP applications. Despite major progress for this task in recent years, one limitation of existing AE research is that they are limited to the English language and certain domains (i.e., scientific and biomedical). Challenges of AE in other languages and domains are mainly unexplored. As such, lacking annotated datasets in multiple languages and domains has been a major issue to prevent research in this direction. To address this limitation, we propose a new dataset for multilingual and multi-domain AE. Specifically, 27,200 sentences in 6 different languages and 2 new domains, i.e., legal and scientific, are manually annotated for AE. Our experiments on the dataset show that AE in different languages and learning settings has unique challenges, emphasizing the necessity of further research on multilingual and multi-domain AE.

MACRONYM: A Large-Scale Dataset for Multilingual and Multi-Domain Acronym Extraction

We investigate methods to develop a parser for Martinican Creole, a highly under-resourced language, using a French treebank. We compare transfer learning and multi-task learning models and examine different input features and strategies to handle the massive size imbalance between the treebanks. Surprisingly, we find that a simple concatenated (French + Martinican Creole) baseline yields optimal results even though it has access to only 80 Martinican Creole sentences. POS embeddings work better than lexical ones, but they suffer from negative transfer.

How to Parse a Creole: When Martinican Creole Meets French

Multi-Stage Framework with Refinement based Point Set Registration for Unsupervised Bi-Lingual Word Alignment

We introduce Mintaka, a complex, natural, and multilingual dataset designed for experimenting with end-to-end question-answering models. Mintaka is composed of 20,000 question-answer pairs collected in English, annotated with Wikidata entities, and translated into Arabic, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish for a total of 180,000 samples. Mintaka includes 8 types of complex questions, including superlative, intersection, and multi-hop questions, which were naturally elicited from crowd workers. We run baselines over Mintaka, the best of which achieves 38% hits@1 in English and 31% hits@1 multilingually, showing that existing models have room for improvement. We release Mintaka at https://github.com/amazon-research/mintaka.

Mintaka: A Complex, Natural, and Multilingual Dataset for End-to-End Question Answering

Denoising Large-Scale Image Captioning from Alt-text Data using Content Selection Models

The way we use words is influenced by our opinion. We investigate whether this is reflected in contextualized word embeddings. For example, is the representation of “animal” different between people who would abolish zoos and those who would not? We explore this question from a Lexical Semantic Change standpoint. Our experiments with BERT embeddings derived from datasets with stance annotations reveal small but significant differences in word representations between opposing stances.

One Word, Two Sides: Traces of Stance in Contextualized Word Representations

Verbal communication is companied by rich non-verbal signals. The usage of gestures, poses, and facial expressions facilitates the information transmission in verbal channel. However, few computational studies have explored the non-verbal channels with finer theoretical lens. We extract gesture representations from monologue video data and train neural sequential models, in order to study the degree to which non-verbal signals can effectively transmit information. We focus on examining whether the gestures demonstrate the similar pattern of entropy rate constancy (ERC) found in words, as predicted by Information Theory. Positive results are shown to support the assumption, which leads to the conclusion that speakers indeed use simple gestures to convey information that enhances verbal communication, and the production of non-verbal information is rationally organized.

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

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Decorrelate Irrelevant, Purify Relevant: Overcome Textual Spurious Correlations from a Feature Perspective

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