Korea, Republic of

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.

COLING 2022

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

embodiment

multimodal

grounding

# 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). 

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.

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.

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.

Modelling Commonsense Properties using Pre-Trained Bi-Encoders

Fake news detection is a challenging problem due to its tremendous real-world political and social impacts. Recent fake news detection works focus on learning news features from News Propagation Graph (NPG). However, little attention is paid to the issues of both authenticity of the relationships and topology imbalance in the structure of NPG, which trick existing methods and thus lead to incorrect prediction results. To tackle these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel Topology
imbalance and Relation inauthenticity aware Hierarchical Graph Attention Networks (TR-HGAN) to identify fake news on social media. Specifically, we design a new topology imbalance smoothing strategy to measure the topology weight of each node. Besides, we adopt a hierarchical-level attention mechanism for graph convolutional learning, which can adaptively identify the authenticity of relationships by assigning appropriate weights to each of them. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that TR-HGAN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Topology imbalance and Relation inauthenticity aware Hierarchical Graph Attention Networks for Fake News Detection

This paper explores a special case in multilingual machine translation: so called multi-parallel translation, where the target data for all language pairs are identical. While multi-parallelism offers benefits which are not available in a standard translation setting, translation models can easily overfit when training data are limited. We introduce a regularizer, the divergence penalty, which penalizes the translation model when it represents source sentences with identical target translations in divergent ways. Experiments on very low- resourced Indigenous North American languages show that an initially deficient multi-lingual translator can improve by 4.9 BLEU through mBART pre-training, and 5.5 BLEU points with the strategic addition of mono-lingual data, and that a divergence penalty leads to further increases of 0.4 BLEU. Further experiments on Germanic languages demonstrate a improvement of 0.5 BLEU when applying the divergence penalty. An investigation of the neural encoder representations learned by our translation models shows that the divergence penalty encourages models to learn a unified neural interlingua.

Penalizing Divergence: Multi-Parallel Translation for Low-Resource Languages of North America

The prevalent use of offensive content in social media has become an important reason for concern for online platforms (customer service chat-boxes, social media platforms, etc.). Classifying offensive and hate-speech content in online settings is an essential task in many applications that needs to be addressed accordingly. However, online text from online platforms can contain code-switching, a combination of more than one language. The non-availability of labeled code-switched data for low-resourced code-switching combinations adds difficulty to this problem. To overcome this, we release a human-generated dataset containing around 10k samples for testing for three language combinations en-fr, en-es, and en-de1 and a synthetic code-switched dataset containing 30k samples for training2. In this paper, we describe the process for gathering human-generated data and our algorithm for creating synthetic code-switched offensive content data. We also introduce the results of a keyword classification baseline and a multi-lingual transformer-based
classification model.

Offensive Content Detection Via Synthetic Code-Switched Text

Fake news’s quick propagation on social media brings severe social ramifications and economic damage. Previous fake news detection usually learn semantic and structural patterns within a single target propagation tree. However, they are usually limited in narrow signals since they do not consider latent information cross other propagation trees. Motivated by a common phenomenon that most fake news is published around a specific hot event/topic, this paper develops a new concept of propagation forest to naturally combine propagation trees in a semantic-aware clustering. We propose a novel Unified Propagation Forest-based framework (UniPF) to fully explore latent correlations between propagation trees to improve fake news detection. Besides, we design a root-induced training strategy, which encourages representations of propagation trees to be closer to their prototypical root nodes. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks consistently suggest the effectiveness and scalability of UniPF.

A Unified Propagation Forest-based Framework for Fake News Detection

We will talk about the boosting module for automatic source code summarization​ via Program Dependency Graph.

Boosting Code Summarization by Embedding Code Structures

Most comparative datasets of Chinese varieties are not digital; however, Wiktionary includes a wealth of transcriptions of words from these varieties. The usefulness of these data is limited by the fact that they use a wide range of variety-specific romanizations, making data difficult to compare. The current work collects this data into a single constituent (IPA, or International Phonetic Alphabet) and structured form (TSV) for use in comparative linguistics and Chinese NLP. At the time of writing, the dataset contains 67,943 entries across 8 varieties and Middle Chinese. The dataset is validated on a protoform reconstruction task using an encoder-decoder cross-attention architecture (Meloni et al 2021), achieving an accuracy of 54.11%, a PER (phoneme error rate) of 17.69%, and a FER (feature error rate) of 6.60%. The data is available at https://github.com/cmu-llab/wikihan and the code is available at https://github.com/cmu-llab/meloni-2021-reimplementation.

WikiHan: A New Comparative Dataset for Chinese Languages

Byte-based Multilingual NMT for Endangered Languages

Event Causality Identification (ECI), which aims to detect whether a causality relation exists between two given textual events, is an important task for event causality understanding. However, the ECI task ignores crucial event structure and cause-effect causality component information, making it struggle for downstream
applications. In this paper, we explore a novel task, namely Event Causality Extraction (ECE), aiming to extract the cause-effect event causality pairs with their structured event information from plain texts. The ECE task is more challenging since each event can contain multiple event arguments, posing fine-grained correlations between events to decide the causeeffect event pair. Hence, we propose a method with a dual grid tagging scheme to capture the intra- and inter-event argument correlations for ECE. Further, we devise a event type-enhanced
model architecture to realize the dual grid tagging scheme. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, and extensive analyses point out several future directions for ECE

Event Causality Extraction with Event Argument Correlations

Driven by deep learning breakthroughs, natural language generation (NLG) models have been at the center of steady progress in the last few years, with a ubiquitous task influence. However, since our ability to generate human-indistinguishable artificial text lags behind our capacity to assess it, it is paramount to develop and apply even better automatic evaluation metrics. To facilitate researchers to judge the effectiveness of their models broadly, we introduce NLG-Metricverse---an end-to-end open-source library for NLG evaluation based on Python. Our framework provides a living collection of NLG metrics in a unified and easy-to-use environment, supplying tools to efficiently apply, analyze, compare, and visualize them. This includes (i) the extensive support to heterogeneous automatic metrics with n-arity management, (ii) the meta-evaluation upon individual performance, metric-metric and metric-human correlations, (iii) graphical interpretations for helping humans better gain score intuitions, (iv) formal categorization and convenient documentation to accelerate metrics understanding. NLG-Metricverse aims to increase the comparability and replicability of NLG research, hopefully stimulating new contributions in the area.

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

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Modelling Commonsense Properties using Pre-Trained Bi-Encoders

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