Korea, Republic of

Multilingual pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on several downstream tasks for both high-resourced and low-resourced languages. However, there is still a large performance drop for languages unseen during pre-training, especially African languages. One of the most effective approaches to adapt to a new language is language adaptive fine-tuning
(LAFT) — fine-tuning a multilingual PLM on monolingual texts of a language using the
pre-training objective. However, adapting to a target language individually takes a large disk space and limits the cross-lingual transfer abilities of the resulting models because they have been specialized for a single language. In this paper, we perform multilingual adaptive fine-tuning on 17 most-resourced African languages and three other high-resource languages widely spoken on the African continent to encourage cross-lingual transfer learning. To further specialize the multilingual PLM, we removed vocabulary tokens from the embedding layer that corresponds to non-
African writing scripts before MAFT, thus reducing the model size by around 50%. Our evaluation on two multilingual PLMs (AfriB-ERTa and XLM-R) and three NLP tasks (NER, news topic classification, and sentiment classification) shows that our approach is competitive to applying LAFT on individual languages while requiring significantly less disk space. Additionally, we show that our adapted PLM also improves the zero-shot cross-lingual transfer abilities of parameter efficient fine-tuning methods.

COLING 2022

Adapting Pre-trained Language Models to African Languages via Multilingual Adaptive Fine-Tuning

adaptive fine-tuning

low resource language

pretrained language model

model compression

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

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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).

technical paper

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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.

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COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

Despite the great progress of Visual Question Answering (VQA), current VQA models heavily rely on the superficial correlation between the question type and its corresponding frequent answers (i.e., language priors) to make predictions, without really understanding the input. In this work, we define the training instances with the same question type but different answers as \textit{superficially similar instances}, and attribute the language priors to the confusion of VQA model on such instances. To solve this problem, we propose a novel training framework that explicitly encourages the VQA model to distinguish between the superficially similar instances. Specifically, for each training instance, we first construct a set that contains its superficially similar counterparts. Then we exploit the proposed distinguishing module to increase the distance between the instance and its counterparts in the answer space. In this way, the VQA model is forced to further focus on the other parts of the input beyond the question type, which helps to overcome the language priors. Experimental results show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on VQA-CP v2.

Overcoming Language Priors in Visual Question Answering via Distinguishing Superficially Similar Instances

Various historical languages, which used to be lingua franca of science and arts, deserve the attention of current NLP research. In this work, we take the first data-driven steps towards this research line for Classical Arabic (CA) by addressing named entity recognition (NER) and topic modeling (TM) on the example of CA literature. We manually annotate the encyclopedic work of Tafsir Al-Tabari with span-based NEs, sentence-based topics, and span-based subtopics, thus creating the Tafsir Dataset with over 51,000 sentences, the first large-scale multi-task benchmark for CA. Next, we analyze our newly generated dataset, which we make open-source available, with current language models (lightweight BiLSTM, transformer-based MaChAmP) along a novel script compression method, thereby achieving state-of-the-art performance for our target task CA-NER. We also show that CA-TM from the perspective of historical topic models, which are central to Arabic studies, is very challenging. With this interdisciplinary work, we lay the foundations for future research on automatic analysis of CA literature.

Tafsir Dataset: A Novel Multi-Task Benchmark for Named Entity Recognition and Topic Modeling in Classical Arabic Literature

Event Causality Identification (ECI) is the task of detecting causal relations between events mentioned in the text. Although this task has been extensively studied for English materials, it is under-explored for many other languages. A major reason for this issue is the lack of multilingual datasets that provide consistent annotations for event causality relations in multiple non-English languages. To address this issue, we introduce a new multilingual dataset for ECI, called MECI. The dataset employs consistent annotation guidelines for five typologically different languages, i.e., English, Danish, Spanish, Turkish, and Urdu. Our dataset thus enable a new research direction on cross-lingual transfer learning for ECI. Our extensive experiments demonstrate high quality for MECI that can provide ample research challenges and directions for future research. We will publicly release MECI to promote research on multilingual ECI.

MECI: A Multilingual Dataset for Event Causality Identification

Programmable Annotation with Diversed Heuristics and Data Denoising

Lexical simplification (LS) is the task of automatically replacing complex words for easier ones making texts more accessible to various target populations (e.g. individuals with low literacy, individuals with learning disabilities, second language learners). To train and test models, LS systems usually require corpora that feature complex words in context along with their candidate substitutions. To continue improving the performance of LS systems we introduce ALEXSIS-PT, a novel multi-candidate dataset for Brazilian Portuguese LS containing 9,605 candidate substitutions for 387 complex words. ALEXSIS-PT has been compiled following the ALEXSIS protocol for Spanish opening exciting new avenues for cross-lingual models. ALEXSIS-PT is the first LS multi-candidate dataset that contains Brazilian newspaper articles. We evaluated four models for substitute generation on this dataset, namely mDistilBERT, mBERT, XLM-R, and BERTimbau. BERTimbau achieved the highest performance across all evaluation metrics.

ALEXSIS-PT: A New Resource for Portuguese Lexical Simplification

A challenging task when generating summaries of legal documents is the ability to address their argumentative nature. We introduce a simple technique to capture the argumentative structure of legal documents by integrating argument role labeling into the summarization process. Experiments with pretrained language models show that our proposed approach improves performance over
strong baselines.

ArgLegalSumm: Improving Abstractive Summarization of Legal Documents with Argument Mining

Community Topic: Topic model inference by consecutive word community discovery

Framing is a political strategy in which journalists and politicians emphasize certain aspects of a societal issue in order to influence and sway public opinion. Frameworks for detecting framing in news articles or social media posts are critical in understanding the spread of biased information in our society. In this paper, we propose CLoSE, a multi-task BERT-based model which uses contrastive learning to embed indicators of frames from news articles in order to predict political bias. We evaluate the performance of our proposed model on subframes and political bias classification tasks. We also demonstrate the model’s classification accuracy on zero-shot and few-shot learning tasks, providing a promising avenue for framing detection in unlabeled data.

CLoSE: Contrastive Learning of Subframe Embeddings for Political Bias Classification of News Media

Behavioural consistency is a critical condition for a language model (LM) to become trustworthy like humans. Despite its importance, however, there is little consensus on the definition of LM consistency, resulting in different definitions across many studies. In this work, we first propose the idea of LM consistency based on behavioural consistency and establish a taxonomy that classifies previously studied consistencies into several sub-categories. Next, we create a new benchmark that allows us to evaluate a model on 19 test cases, distinguished by multiple types of consistency and diverse downstream tasks. Through extensive experiments on the new benchmark, we ascertain that none of the modern pre-trained language models (PLM) performs well in every test case, while exhibiting high inconsistency in many cases.

BECEL: Benchmark for Consistency Evaluation of Language Models

Chinese couplet generation aims to generate a pair of clauses (usually generating a subsequent clause given an antecedent one) with certain rules (e.g., morphological and syntactical symmetry) adhered and has long been a challenging task with cultural background. To generate high-quality couplet (antecedent) clauses, it normally requires a model to learn the correspondences between antecedent and subsequent clauses under aforementioned rules and constraint of few characters with their concise usage. To tackle this task, previous studies normally directly adopt deep neural networks without explicitly taking into account fine-grained analysis of the clauses, in this paper, we propose to enhance Chinese couplet generation by leveraging syntactic information, i.e., part-of-speech (POS) tags and word dependencies. In doing so, we identify word boundaries in the antecedent clause and then use a special attention module to encode the syntactic information over the words for better generating the subsequent clause. Experimental results on a dataset for Chinese couplet generation illustrate the validity and effectiveness of our approach, which outperforms strong baselines with respect to automatic and manual evaluation metrics.

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Adapting Pre-trained Language Models to African Languages via Multilingual Adaptive Fine-Tuning

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