Korea, Republic of

Existing studies on the analysis of persuasion in online discussions focus on investigating the effectiveness of comments in discussions and ignore the analysis of the effectiveness of debaters over multiple discussions.
In this paper, we propose to quantify debaters effectiveness in the online discussion platform: ``ChangeMyView&#39;&#39; in order to explore diverse insights into their persuasion strategies. In particular, targeting debaters with different levels of effectiveness (e.g., good vs. poor), various behavioral characteristics (e.g., engagement) and text stylistic features (e.g., used frames) of debaters are carefully examined, leading to several outcomes that can be the backbone of writing assistants and persuasive text generation.

COLING 2022

Analyzing Persuasion Strategies of Debaters on Social Media

persuasion analysis

discourse analysis

computational argumentation

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Existing studies on the analysis of persuasion in online discussions focus on investigating the effectiveness of comments in discussions and ignore the analysis of the effectiveness of debaters over multiple discussions.
In this paper, we propose to quantify debaters effectiveness in the online discussion platform: ``ChangeMyView'' in order to explore diverse insights into their persuasion strategies. In particular, targeting debaters with different levels of effectiveness (e.g., good vs. poor), various behavioral characteristics (e.g., engagement) and text stylistic features (e.g., used frames) of debaters are carefully examined, leading to several outcomes that can be the backbone of writing assistants and persuasive text generation.

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.

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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.

Current practices in building new NLP models for low-resourced languages rely either on Machine Translation of training sets from better resourced languages or on cross-lingual transfer from them. Still we can see a considerable performance gap between the models originally trained within better resourced languages and the models transferred from them. In this study we test the possibility of (1) using natural annotation to build synthetic training sets from resources not initially designed for the target downstream task and (2) employing curriculum learning methods to select the most suitable examples from synthetic training sets. We test this hypothesis across seven Slavic languages and across three curriculum learning strategies on Named Entity Recognition as the downstream task. We also test the possibility of fine-tuning the synthetic resources to reflect linguistic properties, such as the grammatical case and gender, both of which are important for the Slavic languages. We demonstrate the possibility to achieve the mean F1 score of 0.78 across the three basic entities types for Belarusian starting from zero resources in comparison to the baseline of 0.63 using the zero-shot transfer from English. For comparison, the English model trained on the original set achieves the mean F1-score of 0.75.

Applying Natural Annotation and Curriculum Learning to Named Entity Recognition for Under-Resourced Languages

Diversity can be decomposed into three dis-
tinct concepts, namely: variety, balance and dis-
parity. This paper borrows from the extensive
formalization and measures of diversity devel-
oped in ecology in order to evaluate the variety
and balance of multiword expression annota-
tion produced by automatic annotation systems.
The measures of richness, normalized richness,
and two variations of Hill’s evenness are con-
sidered in this paper. We observe how these
measures behave against increasingly smaller
samples of gold annotations of multiword ex-
pressions and use their comportment to validate
or invalidate their pertinence for multiword ex-
pressions in annotated texts. We apply the vali-
dated measures to annotations in 14 languages
produced by systems during the PARSEME
shared task on automatic identification of mul-
tiword expressions and on the gold versions of
the corpora. We also explore the limits of such
evaluation by studying the impact of lemmati-
zation errors in the Turkish corpus used in the
shared task.

Evaluating Diversity of Multiword Expressions in Annotated Text

Discourse parsing has proven to be useful for a number of NLP tasks that require complex reasoning. However, over a decade since the advent of the Penn Discourse Treebank, predicting implicit discourse relations in text remains challenging. There are several possible reasons for this, and we hypothesize that models should be exposed to more context as it plays an important role in accurate human annotation; meanwhile adding uncertainty measures can improve model accuracy and calibration. To thoroughly investigate this phenomenon, we perform a series of experiments to determine 1) the effects of context on human judgments, and 2) the effect of quantifying uncertainty with annotator confidence ratings on model accuracy and calibration (which we measure using the Brier score (Brier, 1950)). We find that including annotator accuracy and confidence improves model accuracy, and incorporating confidence in the model's temperature function can lead to models with significantly better-calibrated confidence measures. We also find some insightful qualitative results regarding human and model behavior on these datasets.

The Role of Context and Uncertainty in Shallow Discourse Parsing

Can Causal Transformers Process Recursive Nested Constructions, Like Humans?

Biomedical events represent complex, graphical, and semantically rich interactions expressed in the scientific literature. Almost all contributions in the event realm orbit around semantic parsing, usually employing discriminative architectures and cumbersome multi-step pipelines limited to a small number of target interaction types. We present the first lightweight framework to solve both event extraction and event verbalization with a unified text-to-text approach, allowing us to fuse all the resources so far designed for different tasks. To this end, we present a new event graph linearization technique and release highly comprehensive event-text paired datasets, covering more than 150 event types from multiple biology subareas (English language). By streamlining parsing and generation to translations, we propose baseline transformer model results according to multiple biomedical text mining benchmarks and natural language generation metrics. Our extractive models achieve greater state-of-the-art performance than single-task competitors and show promising capabilities for the controlled generation of coherent natural language utterances from structured data.

Text-to-Text Extraction and Verbalization of Biomedical Event Graphs

InferES : A Natural Language Inference Corpus for Spanish Featuring Negation-Based Contrastive and Adversarial Examples

Automatic Generation of Large-scale Multi-turn Dialogues from Reddit

Solving math word problems (MWPs) is an important and challenging problem in natural language processing. Existing approaches to solving MWPs require full supervision in the form of intermediate equations. However, labeling every MWP with its corresponding equations is a time-consuming and expensive task. In order to address this challenge of equation annotation, we propose a weakly supervised model for solving MWPs by requiring only the final answer as supervision. We approach this problem by first learning to generate the equation using the problem description and the final answer, which we subsequently use to train a supervised MWP solver.
We propose and compare various weakly supervised techniques to learn to generate equations directly from the problem description and answer. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that without using equations for supervision, our approach achieves accuracy gains of 4.5% and 32% over the state-of-the-art weakly supervised approach (Honget al., 2021), on the standard Math23K (Wanget al., 2017) and AllArith (Roy and Roth, 2017) datasets respectively. Additionally, we curate and release new datasets of roughly 10k MWPs each in English and in Hindi (a low-resource language). These datasets are suitable for training weakly supervised models. We also present an extension of Warm semi-supervised learning and present further improvements on results, along with insights.

WARM: A Weakly (+Semi) Supervised Math Word Problem Solver

Artificial agents are nowadays challenged to perform embodied AI tasks. To succeed, agents must understand the meaning of verbs and how their corresponding actions transform the surrounding world. In this work, we propose ACT-Thor, a novel controlled benchmark for embodied action understanding. We use the AI2-THOR simulated environment to produce a controlled setup in which an agent, given a before-image and an associated action command, has to determine what the correct after-image is among a set of possible candidates. First, we assess the feasibility of the task via a human evaluation that resulted in 81.4% accuracy, and very high inter-annotator agreement (84.9%). Second, we design both unimodal and multimodal baselines, using state-of-the-art visual feature extractors. Our evaluation and error analysis suggest that only models that have a very structured representation of the actions together with powerful visual features can perform well on the task. However, they still fall behind human performance in a zero-shot scenario where the model is exposed to unseen (action, object) pairs. This paves the way for a systematic way of evaluating embodied AI agents that understand grounded actions.

ACT-Thor: A Controlled Benchmark for Embodied Action Understanding in Simulated Environments

In this presentation, I talk about our work on modelling commonsense properties of concepts. I discuss our proposed biencoder model and the various commonsense knowledge sources explored to pretrain our model. I also discuss the proposed evaluation settings in which the current language models perform poorly.

Analyzing Persuasion Strategies of Debaters on Social Media

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