Korea, Republic of

COLING 2022

Global Readiness of Language Technology for Healthcare: What would it Take to Combat the Next Pandemic?

health bots

nlp for pandemic

multilingual nlp

low resource languages

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Mini Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlBKl0wzmlVF1oCeMQl3BahLd9nLP5Ce/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Posters and Demo guides**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UucMAoCNncIOaH1rMMDa0owuG9qgvJTG/view?usp=sharing)

ACL 2022

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

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!

To gain access to this event page you are required to register. 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.

This presentation introduces a new data augmentation method for neural machine translation that can enforce stronger semantic consistency both within and across languages. Our method is based on Conditional Masked Language Model (CMLM) which is bi-directional and can be conditional on both left and right context, as well as the label. We demonstrate that CMLM is a good technique for generating context-dependent word distributions. In particular, we show that CMLM is capable of enforcing semantic consistency by conditioning on both source and target during substitution. In addition, to enhance diversity, we incorporate the idea of soft word substitution for data augmentation which replaces a word with a probabilistic distribution over the vocabulary. Experiments on four translation datasets of different scales show that the overall solution results in more realistic data augmentation and better translation quality. Our approach consistently achieves the best performance in comparison with strong and recent works and yields improvements of up to 1.90 BLEU points over the baseline.

Semantically Consistent Data Augmentation for Neural Machine Translation via Conditional Masked Language Model

In this research, we present pilot experiments to distil monolingual models from a jointly trained model for 102 languages (mBERT). We demonstrate that it is possible for the target language to outperform the original model, even with a basic distillation setup. We evaluate our methodology for 6 languages with varying amounts of resources and belonging to different language families.

When the Student Becomes the Master: Learning Better and Smaller Monolingual Models from mBERT

Text infilling aims to restore incomplete texts by filling in blanks, which has attracted more attention recently because of its wide application in ancient text restoration and text rewriting. However, attribute-aware text infilling is yet to be explored, and existing methods seldom focus on the infilling length of each blank or the number/location of blanks. In this paper, we propose an Attribute-aware Text Infilling method via a Pre-trained language model (A-TIP), which contains a text infilling component and a plug-and-play discriminator. Specifically, we first design a unified text infilling component with modified attention mechanisms and intra- and inter-blank positional encoding to better perceive the number of blanks and the infilling length for each blank. Then, we propose a plug-and-play discriminator to guide generation towards the direction of improving attribute relevance without decreasing text fluency. Finally, automatic and human evaluations on three open-source datasets indicate that A-TIP achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with all baselines.

A-TIP: Attribute-aware Text Infilling via Pre-trained Language Model

Motivations, emotions, and actions are inter-related essential factors in human activities. While motivations and emotions have long been considered at the core of exploring how people take actions in human activities, there has been relatively little research supporting analyzing the relationship between human mental states and actions. We present the first study that investigates the viability of modeling motivations, emotions, and actions in language-based human activities, named COMMA (Cognitive Framework of Human Activities). Guided by COMMA, we define three natural language processing tasks (emotion understanding, motivation understanding and conditioned action generation), and build a challenging dataset Hail through automatically extracting samples from Story Commonsense. Experimental results on NLP applications prove the effectiveness of modeling the relationship. Furthermore, our models inspired by COMMA can better reveal the essential relationship among motivations, emotions and actions than existing methods.

COMMA: Modeling Relationship among Motivations, Emotions and Actions in Language-based Human Activities

Sentiment analysis has always been an important research direction in natural language processing. The research can be divided into explicit sentiment analysis and implicit sentiment analysis according to whether there are sentiment words in language expression. There have been many research results in explicit sentiment analysis. However, implicit sentiment analysis is rarely studied. Compared with explicit sentiment expression, implicit sentiment expression usually omits a lot of knowledge and common sense, and context also has an important impact on implicit sentiment expression. In this paper, we use a knowledge graph to supplement implicit sentiment expression and propose a novel Implicit Sentiment Analysis model combining Knowledge enhancement and Context features (dubbed KC-ISA). The KC-ISA model can effectively integrate external knowledge and contextual features by the coattention mechanism. Finally, we conduct experiments on the SMP2019 implicit sentiment analysis dataset. Moreover, to verify the generality of the model, we also conduct experiments on two common sentiment analysis datasets. The results on three datasets show that our proposed KC-ISA model can achieve better results on text sentiment analysis.

KC-ISA: An Implicit Sentiment Analysis Model Combining Knowledge Enhancement and Context Features

Multi-intent natural language understanding (NLU) has recently gained attention. It detects multiple intents in an utterance, which is better suited to real-world scenarios. However, the state-of-the-art joint NLU models mainly detect multiple intents on threshold-based strategy, resulting in one main issue: the model is extremely sensitive to the threshold settings. In this paper, we propose a transformer-based Threshold-Free Multi-intent NLU model (TFMN) with multi-task learning (MTL). Specifically, we first leverage multiple layers of a transformer-based encoder to generate multi-grain representations. Then we exploit the information of the number of multiple intents in each utterance without additional manual annotations and propose an auxiliary detection task: Intent Number detection (IND). Furthermore, we propose a threshold-free intent multi-intent classifier that utilizes the output of IND task and detects the multiple intents without depending on the threshold. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed model achieves superior results on two public multi-intent datasets.

A Transformer-based Threshold-Free Framework for Multi-Intent NLU

The stance detection task aims to classify the stance toward given documents and topics. Since the topics can be implicit in documents and unseen in training data for zero-shot settings, we propose to boost the transferability of the stance detection model by using sentiment and commonsense knowledge, which are seldom considered in previous studies. Our model includes a graph autoencoder module to obtain commonsense knowledge and a stance detection module with sentiment and commonsense. Experimental results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the zero-shot and few-shot benchmark dataset--VAST. Meanwhile, ablation studies prove the significance of each module in our model. Analysis of the relations between sentiment, common sense, and stance indicates the effectiveness of sentiment and common sense.

Exploiting Sentiment and Common Sense for Zero-shot Stance Detection

Recently, multimodal information extraction from social media posts has gained increasing attention in the natural language processingcommunity. Despite their success, current approaches overestimate the significance of images. In this paper, we argue that different social media posts should consider different modalities for multimodal information extraction. Some posts are more suitable for the multimodal model, while others are more suitable for the unimodal model. Therefore, we propose a general data splitting strategy to divide the social media posts into two sets so that these two sets can achieve better performance under the information extraction models of the corresponding modalities. Specifically, for an information extraction task, we first propose a data discriminator that divides social media posts into a multimodal and a unimodal set. Then we feed these sets into the corresponding models. Finally, we combine the results of these two models to obtain the final extraction results. Due to the lack of explicit knowledge, we use reinforcement learning to train the data discriminator.

Different Data, Different Modalities! Reinforced Data Splitting for Effective Multimodal Information Extraction from Social Media Posts

State-of-the-art approaches for hate-speech detection usually exhibit poor performance in out-of-domain settings. This occurs, typically, due to classifiers overemphasizing source-specific information that negatively impacts its domain invariance. Prior work has attempted to penalize terms related to hate-speech from manually curated lists using feature attribution methods, which quantify the importance assigned to input terms by the classifier when making a prediction. We, instead, propose a domain adaptation approach that automatically extracts and penalizes source-specific terms using a domain classifier, which learns to differentiate between domains, and feature-attribution scores for hate-speech classes, yielding consistent improvements in cross-domain evaluation.

Domain Classification-based Source-specific Term Penalization for Domain Adaptation in Hate-speech Detection

Introducing a fine-grained controllable story generation model with characters, actions and emotions.

Global Readiness of Language Technology for Healthcare: What would it Take to Combat the Next Pandemic?

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