Korea, Republic of

How can we leverage advances in computational methodology and technology to enhance language learning? In an era of widespread technological application, our understanding of the human-technology interaction and its impact appears to lag behind. In this talk, I outline an approach that combines emerging technologies with current neurocognitive theories in the area of language learning, with particular reference to second language acquisition and its representation. This approach relies on interactive mechanisms (bottom-up and top-down) and integrative processes (theory and application) to enable us to understand the differences between child language and adult language learning, as well as individual differences in diverse language learning contexts. Computational and neurocognitive studies along this line also have significant future promises with the use of AI and digital applications in education, thereby informing pedagogical designs and instructional innovations.

COLING 2022

Computational Language Learning: Technology, Application, and the Brain

[![](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!<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.

invited talk

This paper analyses the degree to which dialect classifiers based on syntactic representations remain stable over space and time. While previous work has shown that the combination of grammar induction and geospatial text classification produces robust dialect models, we do not know what influence both changing grammars and changing populations have on dialect models. This paper constructs a test set for 12 dialects of English that spans three years at monthly intervals with a fixed spatial distribution across 1,120 cities. Syntactic representations are formulated within the usage-based Construction Grammar paradigm (CxG). The decay rate of classification performance for each dialect over time allows us to identify regions undergoing syntactic change. And the distribution of classification accuracy within dialect regions allows us to identify the degree to which the grammar of a dialect is internally heterogeneous. The main contribution of this paper is to show that a rigorous evaluation of dialect classification models can be used to find both variation over space and change over time.

Stability of Syntactic Dialect Classification Over Space and Time

Recent work in black-box adversarial attacks for NLP systems has attracted much attention. Prior black-box attacks assume that attackers can observe output labels from target models based on selected inputs. In this work, inspired by adversarial transferability, we propose a new type of black-box NLP adversarial attack that an attacker can choose a similar domain and transfer the adversarial examples to the target domain and cause poor performance in target model. Based on domain adaptation theory, we then propose a defensive strategy, called Learn2Weight, which trains to predict the weight adjustments for a target model in order to defend against an attack of similar-domain adversarial examples. Using Amazon multi-domain sentiment classification datasets, we empirically show that Learn2Weight is effective against the attack compared to standard black-box defense methods such as adversarial training and defensive distillation. This work contributes to the growing literature on machine learning safety.

Learn2Weight: Weight Transfer Defense Against Similar-domain Adversarial Attacks

We present LANTERN, a multi-stage transformer architecture for named-entity recognition (NER) designed to operate on indefinitely large text sequences (i.e. > 512 elements). For a given image of a form with structured text, our method uses language and spatial features to predict the entity tags of each text element. It breaks the quadratic computational constraints of the attention mechanism by operating over a learned latent space representation which encodes the input sequence via the cross-attention mechanism while having the multi-stage encoding component as a refinement over the NER predictions. As a proxy task, we propose RADAR, an LSTM classifier operating at character level, which predicts the relevance of a word with respect to the entity-recognition task.
Additionally, we formulate a challenging novel NER use case, nutritional information extraction from food product labels. We created a dataset with 11,926 images depicting food product labels entitled TREAT dataset, with fully detailed annotations. Our method achieves superior performance against two competitive models designed for long sequences on the proposed TREAT dataset.

Large Sequence Representation Learning via Multi-Stage Latent Transformers

Neural table-to-text generation approaches are data-hungry, limiting their adaptation for low-resource real-world applications. Previous works mostly resort to Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) to generate fluent summaries of a table. However, they often contain hallucinated contents due to the uncontrolled nature of PLMs. Moreover, the topological differences between tables and sequences are rarely studied. Last but not least, fine-tuning on PLMs with a handful of instances may lead to over-fitting and catastrophic forgetting. To alleviate these problems, we propose a prompt-based approach, Prefix-Controlled Generator (i.e., PCG), for few-shot table-to-text generation. We prepend a task-specific prefix for a PLM to make the table structure better fit the pre-trained input. In addition, we generate an input-specific prefix to control the factual contents and word order of the generated text. Both automatic and human evaluations on different domains (humans, books and songs) of the Wikibio dataset show substantial improvements over baseline approaches.

Few-shot Table-to-text Generation with Prefix-Controlled Generator

Hierarchical Attention Network for Explainable Depression Detection on Twitter Aided by Metaphor Concept Mappings

In this paper, we introduce a new QA dataset, CMQA, which is conditional and contains multiple answers of different quantities. Samples in CMQA have two characteristics: first, multi-span answers can be caused by users lacking related domain knowledge and asking ambiguous questions. In such cases, questions might need multiple conditions to specify the circumstance. Second, multiple answers in a sample might belong to different granularities, and there are often hierarchical relations among them.

Automatic Identification of 5C Vaccine Behaviour on Social Media

Causal Emotion Entailment (CEE) aims to discover the potential causes behind an emotion in a conversational utterance. Previous works formalize CEE as independent utterance pair classification problems, with emotion and speaker information neglected. From a new perspective, this paper considers CEE in a joint framework. We classify multiple utterances synchronously to capture the correlations between utterances in a global view and propose a Two-Stream Attention Model (TSAM) to effectively model the speaker's emotional influences in the conversational history. Specifically, the TSAM comprises three modules: Emotion Attention Network (EAN), Speaker Attention Network (SAN), and interaction module. The EAN and SAN incorporate emotion and speaker information in parallel, and the subsequent interaction module effectively interchanges relevant information between the EAN and SAN via a mutual BiAffine transformation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves new State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) performance and outperforms baselines remarkably.

TSAM: A Two-Stream Attention Model for Causal Emotion Entailment

The cross-entropy loss function is widely used and generally considered the default loss function for text classification. When it comes to ordinal text classification where there is an ordinal relationship between labels, the cross-entropy is not optimal as it does not incorporate the ordinal character into its feedback. In this paper, we propose a new simple loss function called ordinal log-loss (OLL). We show that this loss function outperforms state-of-the-art previously introduced losses on four benchmark text classification datasets.

A simple log-based loss function for ordinal text classification

Distantly supervised relation extraction is challenging due to the noise within data. Recent methods focus on exploiting bag representations based on deep neural networks with complex de-noising scheme to achieve remarkable performance. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective BERT-based Graph convolutional network Model (i.e., BGM). Our BGM comprises of an instance embedding module and a bag representation module. The instance embedding module uses a BERT-based pretrained language model to extract key information from each instance. The bag representaion module constructs the corresponding bag graph then apply a convolutional operation to obtain the bag representation. Our BGM model achieves a considerable improvement on two benchmark datasets, i.e., NYT10 and GDS.

A Simple Model for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction

Temporal sentence grounding (TSG) is crucial and fundamental for video understanding. Previous works typically model the target activity referred to the sentence query in a video by extracting the appearance information from each whole frame. However, these methods fail to distinguish visually similar background noise and capture subtle details of small objects. Although a few recent works additionally adopt a detection model to filter out the background contents and capture local appearances of foreground objects, they rely on the quality of the detection model and suffer from the time-consuming detection process. To this end, we propose a novel detection-free framework for TSG—Grounding with Learnable Foreground (GLF), which efficiently learns to locate the foreground regions related to the query in consecutive frames for better modelling the target activity. Specifically, we first split each video frame into multiple patch candidates of equal size, and reformulate the foreground detection problem as a patch localization task. Then, we develop a self-supervised coarse-to-fine paradigm to learn to locate the most query-relevant patch in each frame and aggregate them among the video for final grounding. Further, we employ a multi-scale patch reasoning strategy to capture more fine-grained foreground information. Extensive experiments on three challenging datasets (Charades-STA, TACoS, ActivityNet) show that the proposed GLF outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

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Computational Language Learning: Technology, Application, and the Brain

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Stability of Syntactic Dialect Classification Over Space and Time

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