Taiwan

Electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) contain valuable knowledge that can be useful for a wide range of purposes. To effectively utilize the knowledge contained in ETDs for downstream tasks such as search and retrieval, question-answering, and summarization, the data first needs to be parsed and stored in a format such as XML. However, since most of the ETDs available on the web are PDF documents, parsing them to make their data useful for downstream tasks is a challenge. In this work, we propose a dataset and a framework to help with parsing long scholarly documents such as ETDs. We take the Object Detection approach for document parsing. We first introduce a set of objects that are important elements of an ETD, along with a new dataset ETD-OD that consists of over 25K page images originating from 200 ETDs with bounding boxes around each of the objects. We also propose a framework that utilizes this dataset for converting ETDs to XML, which can further be used for ETD-related downstream tasks. Our code and pre-trained models are available at: https://github.com/Opening-ETDs/ETD-OD.

IJCNLP-AACL 2022

Parsing Electronic Theses and Dissertations Using Object Detection

document layout analysis

object detection

scholarly documents

[![](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!

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 2022

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

workshop paper

The AACL, Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the AFNLP, Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, invite you to participate in the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL) and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP).

A registration is required to access this event. Access to the event site will be granted to all registered attendees on **November 16th**. If you have not already done so, please register using the link below:
 
 https://conference.iis.sinica.edu.tw/servlet/Register?ConferenceID=411

Registration Is Required

The AACL, Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the AFNLP, Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, invite you to participate in the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL) and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP). 

Mitigating bias in training on biased datasets is an important open problem. Several techniques have been proposed, however the typical evaluation regime is very limited, considering very narrow data conditions. For instance, the effect of target class imbalance and stereotyping is under-studied. To address this gap, we examine the performance of various debiasing methods across multiple tasks, spanning binary classification (Twitter sentiment), multi-class classification (profession prediction), and regression (valence prediction). Through extensive experimentation, we find that data conditions have a strong influence on relative model performance, and that general conclusions cannot be drawn about method efficacy when evaluating only on standard datasets, as is current practice in fairness research.

Examining the Effectiveness of Debiasing Methods under Different Data Conditions

Capitalise on deep learning models, offering Natural Language Processing (NLP) solutions as a part of the Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) has generated handsome revenues. At the same time, it is known that the creation of these lucrative deep models is non-trivial. Therefore, protecting these inventions’ intellectual property rights (IPR) from being abused, stolen and plagiarized is vital. This paper proposes a practical approach for the IPR protection on recurrent neural networks (RNN) without all the bells and whistles of existing IPR solutions. Particularly, we introduce the Gatekeeper concept that resembles the recurrent nature in RNN architecture to embed keys. Also, we design the model training scheme in a way such that the protected RNN model will retain its original performance iff a genuine key is presented. Extensive experiments showed that our protection scheme is robust and effective against ambiguity and removal attacks in both white-box and black-box protection schemes on different RNN variants. Code is available at https://github.com/zhiqin1998/RecurrentIPR.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.8/)

An Embarrassingly Simple Approach for Intellectual Property Rights Protection on Recurrent Neural Networks

Recently there has been much interest in adapting foundation models such as ALBERT, RoBERTa, T5, GPT-3 and CLIP for different downstream tasks. These models demonstrate powerful transfer capabilities largely because they have acquired the rich body of knowledge contained in their pre-training data. However, their pre-training data may also contain social biases and stereotypes, especially when the data are crawled from the internet without cleaning. As a result, pre-trained models may “inherit” these biases and stereotypes, affecting the fairness of systems derived from these foundation models for downstream tasks. In this paper we study how to measure stereotypical bias in pre-trained vision-language models and leverage a recently released text-only dataset, StereoSet, which covers a wide range of stereotypical bias, and extend it into a vision-language probing dataset called VLStereoSet to measure stereotypical bias in vision-language models. We analyze the differences between text and image and propose a probing task that detects bias by evaluating a model's tendency to pick stereotypical statements as captions for anti-stereotypical images. We further define several metrics to measure both a vision-language model's overall stereotypical bias and its intra-modal and inter-modal bias.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.40/)

VLStereoSet: A Study of Stereotypical Bias in Pre-trained Vision-Language Models

The concerning rise of hateful content on online platforms has increased the attention towards automatic hate speech detection, commonly formulated as a supervised classification task. State-of-the-art deep learning-based approaches usually require a substantial amount of labeled resources for training. However, annotating hate speech resources is expensive, time-consuming, and often harmful to the annotators. This creates a pressing need to transfer knowledge from the existing labeled resources to low-resource hate speech corpora with the goal of improving system performance. For this, neighborhood-based frameworks have been shown to be effective. However, they have limited flexibility. In our paper, we propose a novel training strategy that allows flexible modeling of the relative proximity of neighbors retrieved from a resource-rich corpus to learn the amount of transfer. In particular, we incorporate neighborhood information with Optimal Transport, which permits exploiting the geometry of the data embedding
space. By aligning the joint embedding and label distributions of neighbors, we demonstrate substantial improvements over strong baselines, in low-resource scenarios, on different publicly available hate speech corpora.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.35/)

Transferring Knowledge via Neighborhood-aware Optimal Transport for Low-resource Hate Speech Detection

Different linguistic expressions can conceptualize the same event from different viewpoints by emphasizing certain participants over others. Here, we investigate a case where this has social consequences: how do linguistic expressions of gender-based violence (GBV) influence who we perceive as responsible? We build on previous psycholinguistic research in this area and conduct a large-scale perception survey of GBV descriptions automatically extracted from a corpus of Italian newspapers. We then train regression models that predict the salience of GBV participants with respect to different dimensions of perceived responsibility. Our best model (fine-tuned BERT) shows solid overall performance, with large differences between dimensions and participants: salient 'focus' is more predictable than salient 'blame', and perpetrators' salience is more predictable than victims' salience. Experiments with ridge regression models using different representations show that features based on linguistic theory similarly to word-based features. Overall, we show that different linguistic choices do trigger different perceptions of responsibility, and that such perceptions can be modelled automatically. This work can be a core instrument to raise awareness of the consequences of different perspectivizations in the general public and in news producers alike.

Dead or Murdered? Predicting Responsibility Perception in Femicide News Reports

Multimodal aspect-based sentiment analysis (MABSA) aims to extract the aspect terms from text and image pairs, and then analyze their corresponding sentiment. Recent studies typically use either a pipeline method or a unified transformer based on a cross-attention mechanism. However, these methods fail to explicitly and effectively incorporate the alignment between text and image. Supervised finetuning of the universal transformers for MABSA still requires a certain number of aligned image-text pairs. This study proposes a dual-encoder transformer with cross-modal alignment (DTCA). Two auxiliary tasks, including text-only extraction and text-patch alignment are introduced to enhance cross-attention performance. To align text and image, we propose an unsupervised approach which minimizes the Wasserstein distance between both modalities, forcing both encoders to produce more appropriate representations for the final extraction. Experimental results on two benchmarks demonstrate that DTCA consistently outperforms existing methods.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.32/)

Dual-Encoder Transformers with Cross-modal Alignment for Multimodal Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

The increased interest in time-domain astronomy over the last decades has resulted in a substantial increase in observation report publication leading to a saturation of how astrophysicists read, analyze and classify information. Due to the short life span of the detected astronomical events, information related to the characterization of new phenomena has to be communicated and analyzed very rapidly to allow other observatories to react and conduct their follow-up observations. This paper introduces TDAC: a Time-Domain Astrophysics Corpus. TDAC is the first corpus based on astrophysical observation reports. We also present the NLP experiments we made for named entity recognition based on annotations we made and annotations from the WIESP DEAL shared task.

TDAC, The First Corpus in Time-Domain Astrophysics: Analysis and First Experiments on Named Entity Recognition

Reproducibility is an important feature of science; experiments are retested, and analyses are repeated. Trust in the findings increases when consistent results are achieved. Despite the importance of reproducibility, significant work is often involved in these efforts, and some published findings may not be reproducible due to oversights or errors. In this paper, we examine a myriad of features in scholarly articles published in computer science conferences and journals and test how they correlate with reproducibility. We collected data from three different sources that labeled publications as either reproducible or irreproducible and employed statistical significance tests to identify features of those publications that hold clues about reproducibility. We found the readability of the scholarly article and accessibility of the software artifacts through hyperlinks to be strong signals noticeable amongst reproducible scholarly articles.

Reproducibility Signals in Science: A preliminary analysis

Information Extraction from scientific literature can be challenging due to the highly specialised nature of such text. We describe our entity recognition methods developed as part of the DEAL (Detecting Entities in the Astrophysics Literature) shared task. The aim of the task is to build a system that can identify Named Entities in a dataset composed by scholarly articles from astrophysics literature. We planned our participation such that it enables us to conduct an empirical comparison between word-based tagging and span-based classification methods. When evaluated on two hidden test sets provided by the organizer, our best-performing submission achieved F1 scores of 0.8307 (validation phase) and 0.7990 (testing phase).

Detecting Entities in the Astrophysics Literature: A Comparison of Word-based and Span-based Entity Recognition Methods

Question answering (QA) is one of the most important natural language processing tasks. At present, the machine has surpassed human-level performance in some simple QA datasets, but it is still insufficient in answering complex questions involving multiple reasoning abilities such as multi-hop reasoning, and logic operations. In this talk, I will present our explainable reasoning framework for Complex QA, where the question-answering system gives the step-by-step reasoning process to improve interpretability and reliability. Specifically, I will introduce our attempts and experiences in knowledge-oriented programming, automatic program induction, and visualization.

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