Korea, Republic of

Automatically detecting the intent of an utterance is important for various downstream natural language processing tasks. This task is also called Dialogue Act Classification (DAC) and was primarily researched on spoken one-to-one conversations. The rise of social media has made this an interesting data source to explore within DAC, although it comes with some difficulties: non-standard form, variety of language types (across and within platforms), and quickly evolving norms.
We therefore investigate the robustness of DAC on social media data in this paper. More concretely, we provide a benchmark that includes cross-domain data splits, as well as a variety of improvements on our %strong
transformer-based baseline. Our experiments show that lexical normalization is not beneficial in this setup, balancing the labels through resampling is beneficial in some cases, and incorporating context is crucial for this task and leads to the highest performance improvements (~7 F1 percentage points in-domain and ~20 cross-domain).

COLING 2022

Increasing Robustness for Cross-domain Dialogue Act Classification on Social Media Data

dialogue act classification

cross-domain

robustness

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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!<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.

workshop paper

Scientific medical terms are difficult to understand for laypeople due to their technical formulas and etymology. Understanding medical concepts is important for laypeople as personal and public health is a lifelong concern. In this study, we present our methodology for building a French lexical resource annotated with paraphrases for the simplification of monolexical and multiword medical terms. In order to find medical paraphrases, we automatically searched for medical terms and specific lexical markers that help to paraphrase them. We annotated the medical terms, the paraphrase markers, and the paraphrase. We analysed the lexical relations and semantico-pragmatic functions that exists between the term and its paraphrase. We computed statistics for the medical paraphrase corpus, and we evaluated the readability of the medical paraphrases for a non-specialist coder. Our results show that medical paraphrases from popularization texts are easier to understand (62.66%) than paraphrases extracted from scientific texts (50%).

Identifying Medical Paraphrases in Scientific versus Popularization Texts in French for Laypeople Understanding

Summarizing Interactive Digital Narratives (IDN) presents some unique challenges to existing text summarization models especially around capturing interactive elements in addition to important plot points. In this paper we describe the first IDN dataset (IDN-Sum) designed specifically for training and testing IDN text summarization algorithms. Our dataset is generated using random playthroughs of 8 IDN episodes, taken from 2 different IDN games, and consists of 10,000 documents. Playthrough documents are annotated through automatic alignment with fan-sourced summaries using a commonly used alignment algorithm. We also report and discuss results from experiments applying common baseline extractive text summarization algorithms to this dataset. Qualitative analysis of the results reveal shortcomings in common annotation approaches and evaluation methods when applied to narrative and interactive narrative datasets. The dataset is released as open source for future researchers to train and test their own approaches for IDN text.

IDN-Sum : A New Dataset for Interactive Digital Narrative Extractive Text Summarisation

Web-crawled datasets are known to be noisy, as they feature a wide range of language use covering both user-generated and professionally edited content as well as noise originating from the crawling process. This article presents one solution to reduce this noise by using automatic register (genre) identification---whether the texts are, e.g., forum discussions, lyrical or how-to pages. 
We apply the multilingual register identification model by Rönnqvist et al. (2021) and label the widely used Oscar dataset. Additionally, we evaluate the model against eight new languages, showing that the performance is comparable to previous findings on a restricted set of languages. Finally, we present and apply a machine learning method for further cleaning text files originating from Web crawls from remains of boilerplate and other elements not belonging to the main text of the Web page. The register labeled and cleaned dataset covers 351 million documents in 14 languages and is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/
TurkuNLP/register_oscar.

Towards better structured and less noisy Web data: Oscar with Register annotations

Approaches to machine generated text detection tend to focus on binary classification of human versus machine written text. In the scientific domain where publishers might use these models to examine manuscripts under submission, misclassification has the potential to cause harm to authors. Additionally, authors may appropriately use text generation models such as with the use of assistive technologies like translation tools. In this setting, a binary classification scheme might be used to flag appropriate uses of assistive text generation technology as simply machine generated which is a cause of concern. In our work, we simulate this scenario by presenting a state-of-the-art detector trained on the DAGPap22 with machine translated passages from Scielo and find that the model performs at random. Given this finding, we develop a framework for dataset development that provides a nuanced approach to detecting machine generated text by having labels for the type of technology used such as for translation or paraphrase resulting in the construction of SynSciPass. By training the same model that performed well on DAGPap22 on SynSciPass, we show that not only is the model more robust to domain shifts but also is able to uncover the type of technology used for machine generated text. Despite this, we conclude that current datasets are neither comprehensive nor realistic enough to understand how these models would perform in the wild where manuscript submissions can come from many unknown or novel distributions, how they would perform on scientific full-texts rather than small passages, and what might happen when there is a mix of appropriate and inappropriate uses of natural language generation.

SynSciPass: detecting appropriate uses of scientific text generation

We present a simple yet effective method to train a named entity recognition (NER) model that operates on business telephone conversation transcripts that contain noise due to the nature of spoken conversation and artifacts of automatic speech recognition. We first fine-tune LUKE, a state-of-the-art Named Entity Recognition (NER) model, on a limited amount of transcripts, then use it as the teacher model to teach a smaller DistilBERT-based student model using a large amount of weakly labeled data and a small amount of human-annotated data. The model achieves high accuracy while also satisfying the practical constraints for inclusion in a commercial telephony product: realtime performance when deployed on cost-effective CPUs rather than GPUs.

An Effective, Performant Named Entity Recognition System for
Noisy Business Telephone Conversation Transcripts

The automatic categorization of support tickets is a fundamental tool for modern businesses. Such requests are most commonly composed of concise textual descriptions that are noisy and filled with technical jargon. In this paper, we test the effectiveness of pre-trained LMs for the classification of issues related to software bugs. First, we test several strategies to produce single, ticket-wise representations starting from their BERT-generated word embeddings.
Then, we showcase a simple yet effective way to build a multi-level classifier for the categorization of documents with two hierarchically dependent labels. We experiment on a public bugs dataset and compare our results with standard BERT-based and traditional SVM classifiers. Our findings suggest that both embedding strategies and hierarchical label dependencies considerably impact classification accuracy.

A multi-level approach for hierarchical Ticket Classification

Hate speech detection systems have been shown to be vulnerable against obfuscation attacks, where a potential hater tries to circumvent detection by deliberately introducing noise in their posts. In previous work, noise is often introduced for all words (which is likely overestimating the impact) or single untargeted words (likely underestimating the vulnerability). We perform a user study asking people to select words they would obfuscate in a post. Using this realistic setting, we find that the real vulnerability of hate speech detection systems against deliberately introduced noise is almost as high as when using a white-box attack and much more severe than when using a non-targeted dictionary. Our results are based on 4 different datasets, 12 different obfuscation strategies, and hate speech detection systems using different paradigms.

Analyzing the Real Vulnerability of Hate Speech Detection Systems against Targeted Intentional Noise

Monitoring vaccine behaviour through social media can guide health policy. We present a new dataset of 9471 tweets posted in Australia from 2020 to 2022, annotated with sentiment toward vaccines and also 5C, the five types
of behaviour toward vaccines, a scheme commonly used in health psychology literature. We benchmark our dataset using BERT and Gradient Boosting Machine and show that jointly training both sentiment and 5C tasks (F1=48) outperforms individual training (F1=39) in this highly imbalanced data. Our sentiment analysis
indicates close correlation between the sentiments and prominent events during the pandemic. We hope that our dataset and benchmark models will inform further work in online monitoring of vaccine behaviour. The dataset and benchmark methods are accessible online.

Automatic Identification of 5C Vaccine Behaviour on Social Media

The ability to track fine-grained emotions in customer service dialogues has many real-world applications, but has not been studied extensively. This paper measures the potential of prediction models on that task, based on a real-world dataset of Dutch Twitter conversations in the domain of customer service. We find that modeling emotion trajectories has a small, but measurable benefit compared to predictions based on isolated turns. The models used in our study are shown to generalize well to different companies and economic sectors.

An Emotional Journey: Detecting Emotion Trajectories in Dutch Customer Service Dialogues

In recent years, false information such as fake news, rumors and conspiracy theories on many relevant issues in society have proliferated. This phenomenon has been significantly amplified by the fast and inexorable spread of misinformation on social media and instant messaging platforms. With this work, we contribute to containing the negative impact on society caused by fake news. We propose a graph neural network approach for detecting false information on Twitter. We leverage the inherent structure of graph-based social media data aggregating information from short text messages (tweets), user profiles and social interactions. We use knowledge from pre-trained language models efficiently, and show that user-defined descriptions of profiles provide useful information for improved prediction performance. The empirical results indicate that our proposed framework significantly outperforms text- and user-based methods on misinformation datasets from two different domains, even in a difficult multilingual setting.

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Increasing Robustness for Cross-domain Dialogue Act Classification on Social Media Data

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Identifying Medical Paraphrases in Scientific versus Popularization Texts in French for Laypeople Understanding

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