United Arab Emirates

Current works about false information detection based on conversation graphs on social networks focus primarily on two research streams from the standpoint of topic distribution: in-topic and cross-topic techniques, which assume that the data topic distribution is identical or cross, respectively. This signifies that all test data topics are seen or unseen by the model.
However, these assumptions are too harsh for actual social networks that contain both seen and unseen topics simultaneously, hence restricting their practical application.
In light of this, this paper develops a novel open-topic scenario that is better suited to actual social networks. In this open-topic scenario, we empirically find that the existing models suffer from impairment in the detection performance for seen or unseen topic data, resulting in poor overall model performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel Contrastive Adversarial Learning Network, CALN, that employs an unsupervised topic clustering method to capture topic-specific features to enhance the model&#39;s performance for seen topics and an unsupervised adversarial learning method to align data representation distributions to enhance the model&#39;s generalisation to unseen topics.
Experiments on two benchmark datasets and a variety of graph neural networks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

EMNLP 2022

Open-Topic False Information Detection on Social Networks with Contrastive Adversarial Learning

conversation graphs

contrastive adversarial learning

open-topic

false information detection

social networks

Current works about false information detection based on conversation graphs on social networks focus primarily on two research streams from the standpoint of topic distribution: in-topic and cross-topic techniques, which assume that the data topic distribution is identical or cross, respectively. This signifies that all test data topics are seen or unseen by the model.
However, these assumptions are too harsh for actual social networks that contain both seen and unseen topics simultaneously, hence restricting their practical application.
In light of this, this paper develops a novel open-topic scenario that is better suited to actual social networks. In this open-topic scenario, we empirically find that the existing models suffer from impairment in the detection performance for seen or unseen topic data, resulting in poor overall model performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel Contrastive Adversarial Learning Network, CALN, that employs an unsupervised topic clustering method to capture topic-specific features to enhance the model's performance for seen topics and an unsupervised adversarial learning method to align data representation distributions to enhance the model's generalisation to unseen topics.
Experiments on two benchmark datasets and a variety of graph neural networks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

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EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

Event detection (ED) identifies and classifies event triggers from unstructured texts, serving as a fundamental task for information extraction. Despite the remarkable progress achieved in the past several years, most research efforts focus on detecting events from formal texts (e.g., news articles, Wikipedia documents, financial announcements). Moreover, the texts in each dataset are either from a single source or multiple yet relatively homogeneous sources. With massive amounts of user-generated text accumulating on the Web and inside enterprises, identifying meaningful events in these informal texts, usually from multiple heterogeneous sources, has become a problem of significant practical value. As a pioneering exploration that expands event detection to the scenarios involving informal and heterogeneous texts, we propose a new large-scale Chinese event detection dataset based on user reviews, text conversations, and phone conversations in a leading e-commerce platform for food service. We carefully investigate the proposed dataset's textual informality and multi-domain heterogeneity characteristics by inspecting data samples quantitatively and qualitatively. Extensive experiments with state-of-the-art event detection methods verify the unique challenges posed by these characteristics, indicating that multi-domain informal event detection remains an open problem and requires further efforts. Our benchmark and code are released at https://github.com/myeclipse/MUSIED.

MUSIED: A Benchmark for Event Detection from Multi-Source Heterogeneous Informal Texts

Reproducibility is of utmost concern in machine learning and natural language processing (NLP). In the field of natural language generation (especially machine translation), the seminal paper of Post (2018) has pointed out problems of reproducibility of the dominant metric, BLEU, at the time of publication. Nowadays, BERT-based evaluation metrics considerably outperform BLEU. In this paper, we ask whether results and claims from four recent BERT-based metrics can be reproduced. We find that reproduction of claims and results often fails because of (i) heavy undocumented preprocessing involved in the metrics, (ii) missing code and (iii) reporting weaker results for the baseline metrics. (iv) In one case, the problem stems from correlating not to human scores but to a wrong column in the csv file, inflating scores by 5 points. Motivated by the impact of preprocessing, we then conduct a second study where we examine its effects more closely (for one of the metrics). We find that preprocessing can have large effects, especially for highly inflectional languages. In this case, the effect of preprocessing may be larger than the effect of the aggregation mechanism (e.g., greedy alignment vs. Word Mover Distance).

Reproducibility Issues for BERT-based Evaluation Metrics

In monolingual dense retrieval, lots of works focus on how to distill knowledge from cross-encoder re-ranker to dual-encoder retriever and these methods achieve better performance due to the effectiveness of cross-encoder re-ranker. However, we find that the performance of the cross-encoder re-ranker is heavily influenced by the number of training samples and the quality of negative samples, which is hard to obtain in the cross-lingual setting. In this paper, we propose to use a query generator as the teacher in the cross-lingual setting, which is less dependent on enough training samples and high-quality negative samples. In addition to traditional knowledge distillation, we further propose a novel enhancement method, which uses the query generator to help the dual-encoder align queries from different languages, but does not need any additional parallel sentences. The experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets.

Empowering Dual-Encoder with Query Generator for Cross-Lingual Dense Retrieval

Document-level natural language inference (DOCNLI) is a new challenging task in natural language processing, aiming at judging the entailment relationship between a pair of hypothesis and premise documents. Current datasets and baselines largely follow sentence-level settings, but fail to address the issues raised by longer documents. In this paper, we establish a general solution, named Retrieval, Reading and Fusion (R2F) framework, and a new setting, by analyzing the main challenges of DOCNLI: interpretability, long-range dependency, and cross-sentence inference. The basic idea of the framework is to simplify document-level task into a set of sentence-level tasks, and improve both performance and interpretability with the power of evidence. For each hypothesis sentence, the framework retrieves evidence sentences from the premise, and reads to estimate its credibility. Then the sentence-level results are fused to judge the relationship between the documents. For the setting, we contribute complementary evidence and entailment label annotation on hypothesis sentences, for interpretability study. Our experimental results show that R2F framework can obtain state-of-the-art performance and is robust for diverse evidence retrieval methods. Moreover, it can give more interpretable prediction results. Our model and code are released at https://github.com/phoenixsecularbird/R2F.

R2F: A General Retrieval, Reading and Fusion Framework for Document-level Natural Language Inference

Extractive Question Answering (EQA) is one of the most essential tasks in Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC), which can be solved by fine-tuning the span selecting heads of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). However, most existing approaches for MRC may perform poorly in the few-shot learning scenario. To solve this issue, we propose a novel framework named Knowledge Enhanced Contrastive Prompt-tuning (KECP). Instead of adding pointer heads to PLMs, we introduce a seminal paradigm for EQA that transforms the task into a non-autoregressive Masked Language Modeling (MLM) generation problem. Simultaneously, rich semantics from the external knowledge base (KB) and the passage context support enhancing the query's representations. In addition, to boost the performance of PLMs, we jointly train the model by the MLM and contrastive learning objectives. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in few-shot settings by a large margin.

KECP: Knowledge Enhanced Contrastive Prompting for Few-shot Extractive Question Answering

In this paper we revisit automatic metrics for paraphrase evaluation and obtain two findings that disobey conventional wisdom: (1) Reference-free metrics achieve better performance than their reference-based counterparts. (2) Most commonly used metrics do not align well with human annotation.
Underlying reasons behind the above findings are explored through additional experiments and in-depth analyses.
Based on the experiments and analyses, we propose ParaScore, a new evaluation metric for paraphrase generation. It possesses the merits of reference-based and reference-free metrics and explicitly models lexical divergence. Based on our analysis and improvements, our proposed reference-based outperforms than reference-free metrics.
Experimental results demonstrate that ParaScore significantly outperforms existing metrics.

On the Evaluation Metrics for Paraphrase Generation

Relational structures such as schema linking and schema encoding have been validated as a key component to qualitatively translating natural language into SQL queries. However, introducing these structural relations comes with prices: they often result in a specialized model structure, which largely prohibits using large pretrained models in text-to-SQL. To address this problem, we propose RASAT: a Transformer seq2seq architecture augmented with relation-aware self-attention that could leverage a variety of relational structures while inheriting the pretrained parameters from the T5 model effectively. Our model can incorporate almost all types of existing relations in the literature, and in addition, we propose introducing co-reference relations for the multi-turn scenario. Experimental results on three widely used text-to-SQL datasets, covering both single-turn and multi-turn scenarios, have shown that RASAT could achieve competitive results in all three benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art execution accuracy (75.5% EX on Spider, 52.6% IEX on SParC, and 37.4% IEX on CoSQL).

RASAT: Integrating Relational Structures into Pretrained Seq2Seq Model for Text-to-SQL

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) aims to extract sentiment triplets from sentences, which was recently formalized as an effective machine reading comprehension (MRC) based framework. However, when facing multiple aspect terms, the MRC-based methods could fail due to the interference from other aspect terms. In this paper, we propose a novel \textit{COntext-Masked MRC} (COM-MRC) framework for ASTE. Our COM-MRC framework comprises three closely-related components: a context augmentation strategy, a discriminative model, and an inference method. Specifically, a context augmentation strategy is designed by enumerating all masked contexts for each aspect term. The discriminative model comprises four modules, i.e., aspect and opinion extraction modules, sentiment classification and aspect detection modules. In addition, a two-stage inference method first extracts all aspects and then identifies their opinions and sentiment through iteratively masking the aspects. Extensive experimental results on benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of our proposed COM-MRC framework, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods consistently.

COM-MRC: A COntext-Masked Machine Reading Comprehension Framework for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction

Aiming to ensure chatbot quality by predicting chatbot failure and enabling human-agent collaboration, Machine-Human Chatting Handoff (MHCH) has attracted lots of attention from both industry and academia in recent years. 
However, most existing methods mainly focus on the dialogue context or assist with global satisfaction prediction based on multi-task learning, which ignore the grounded relationships among the causal variables, like the user state and labor cost. These variables are significantly associated with handoff decisions, resulting in prediction bias and cost increasement. 
Therefore, we propose Causal-Enhance Module (CEM) by establishing the causal graph of MHCH based on these two variables, which is a simple yet effective module and can be easy to plug into the existing MHCH methods. 
For the impact of users, we use the user state to correct the prediction bias according to the causal relationship of multi-task. For the labor cost, we train an auxiliary cost simulator to calculate unbiased labor cost through counterfactual learning so that a model becomes cost-aware.
Extensive experiments conducted on four real-world benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of CEM in generally improving the performance of existing MHCH methods without any elaborated model crafting.

CEM: Machine-Human Chatting Handoff via Causal-Enhance Module

Dialog systems are often designed or trained to output human-like responses. However, some responses may be impossible for a machine to truthfully say (e.g. "that movie made me cry"). Highly anthropomorphic responses might make users uncomfortable or implicitly deceive them into thinking they are interacting with a human. 
We collect human ratings on the feasibility of approximately 900 two-turn dialogs sampled from 9 diverse data sources. Ratings are for two hypothetical machine embodiments: a futuristic humanoid robot and a digital assistant. We find that for some data-sources commonly used to train dialog systems, 20-30\% of utterances are not viewed as possible for a machine. Rating is marginally affected by machine embodiment. 
We explore qualitative and quantitative reasons for these ratings. Finally, we build classifiers and explore how modeling configuration might affect output permissibly, and discuss implications for building less falsely anthropomorphic dialog systems.

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Open-Topic False Information Detection on Social Networks with Contrastive Adversarial Learning

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MUSIED: A Benchmark for Event Detection from Multi-Source Heterogeneous Informal Texts

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Open-Topic False Information Detection on Social Networks with Contrastive Adversarial Learning

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Next from EMNLP 2022

MUSIED: A Benchmark for Event Detection from Multi-Source Heterogeneous Informal Texts

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PRESENTATIONS

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COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads