United Arab Emirates

African languages are spoken by over a billion people, but they are under-represented in NLP research and development. Multiple challenges exist, including the limited availability of annotated training and evaluation datasets as well as the lack of understanding of which settings, languages, and recently proposed methods like cross-lingual transfer will be effective. In this paper, we aim to move towards solutions for these challenges, focusing on the task of named entity recognition (NER). We present the creation of the largest to-date human-annotated NER dataset for 20 African languages. We study the behaviour of state-of-the-art cross-lingual transfer methods in an Africa-centric setting, empirically demonstrating that the choice of source transfer language significantly affects performance. While much previous work defaults to using English as the source language, our results show that choosing the best transfer language improves zero-shot F1 scores by an average of 14\% over 20 languages as compared to using English.

EMNLP 2022

MasakhaNER 2.0: Africa-centric Transfer Learning for Named Entity Recognition

african languages

pre-trained language models

named entity recognition

cross-lingual transfer

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.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

* EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid” in a second sense, as well: we allowed both direct and rolling review paper submissions, building on the pilot experiment of EMNLP 2021, which considered a small number of ARR submissions. 
* Familiar from NAACL but new to EMNLP, we’ve added an industry track.
* During the conference, “portals” will link virtual poster sessions to in-person conference participants during poster sessions each day.
* The first ACL-family conference in the United Arab Emirates.

 *Message from Noah A. Smith, University of Washington and Allen Institute for AI, Seattle, Washington, USA* 
***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
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Welcome!
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.

The task of query rewrite aims to convert an in-context query to its fully-specified version where ellipsis and coreference are completed and referred-back according to the history context. Although much progress has been made, less efforts have been paid to real scenario conversations that involve drawing information from more than one modalities. In this paper, we propose the task of multimodal conversational query rewrite (McQR), which performs query rewrite under the multimodal visual conversation setting. We collect a large-scale dataset named McQueen based on manual annotation, which contains 15k visual conversations and over 80k queries where each one is associated with a fully-specified rewrite version. In addition, for entities appearing in the rewrite, we provide the corresponding image box annotation. We then use the McQueen dataset to benchmark a state-of-the-art method for effectively tackling the McQR task, which is based on a multimodal pre-trained model with pointer generator. Extensive experiments are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on this task.

McQueen: a Benchmark for Multimodal Conversational Query Rewrite

Existing sentiment analysis models have achieved great advances with the help of sufficient sentiment annotations. Unfortunately, many languages do not have sufficient sentiment corpus. To this end, recent studies have proposed cross-lingual sentiment analysis to transfer sentiment analysis models from resource-rich languages to low-resource languages. However, these studies either rely on external cross-lingual supervision (e.g., parallel corpora and translation model), or are limited by the cross-lingual gaps. In this work, based on the intuitive assumption that the relationships between emojis and sentiments are consistent across different languages, we investigate transferring sentiment knowledge across languages with the help of emojis. To this end, we propose a novel cross-lingual sentiment analysis approach dubbed Curriculum Knowledge Distiller (CKD). The core idea of CKD is to use emojis to bridge the source and target languages. Note that, compared with texts, emojis are more transferable, but cannot reveal the precise sentiment. Thus, we distill multiple Intermediate Sentiment Classifiers (ISC) on source language corpus with emojis to get ISCs with different attention weights of texts. To transfer them into the target language, we distill ISCs into the Target Language Sentiment Classifier (TSC) following the curriculum learning mechanism. In this way, TSC can learn delicate sentiment knowledge, meanwhile, avoid being affected by cross-lingual gaps. Experimental results on five cross-lingual benchmarks clearly verify the effectiveness of our approach.

Curriculum Knowledge Distillation for Emoji-supervised Cross-lingual Sentiment Analysis

Intermediate-task transfer can benefit a wide range of NLP tasks with properly selected source datasets. However, it is computationally infeasible to experiment with all intermediate transfer combinations, making choosing a useful source task a challenging problem. In this paper, we anticipate that task-specific parameters updated in parameter-efficient tuning methods are likely to encode task-specific information. Therefore, such parameters can be predictive for inter-task transferability. Thus, we propose to exploit these efficiently tuned parameters as off-the-shelf task embeddings for the efficient selection of source datasets for intermediate-task transfer. We experiment with 11 text classification tasks and 11 question answering tasks. Experimental results show that our approach consistently outperforms existing inter-task transferability prediction methods while being conceptually simple and computationally efficient. Our analysis also reveals that the ability of efficiently tuned parameters on transferability prediction is disentangled with their in-task performance. This allows us to use parameters from early checkpoints as task embeddings to further improve efficiency.

Efficiently Tuned Parameters Are Task Embeddings

Linguistic acceptability (LA) attracts the attention of the research community due to its many uses, such as testing the grammatical knowledge of language models and filtering implausible texts with acceptability classifiers.
However, the application scope of LA in languages other than English is limited due to the lack of high-quality resources.
To this end, we introduce the Russian Corpus of Linguistic Acceptability (RuCoLA), built from the ground up under the well-established binary LA approach. 
RuCoLA consists of 9.8k in-domain sentences from linguistic publications and 3.6k out-of-domain sentences produced by generative models. The out-of-domain set is created to facilitate the practical use of acceptability for improving language generation.
Our paper describes the data collection protocol and presents a fine-grained analysis of acceptability classification experiments with a range of baseline approaches.
In particular, we demonstrate that the most widely used language models still fall behind humans by a large margin, especially when detecting morphological and semantic errors. We release RuCoLA, the code of experiments, and a public leaderboard to assess the linguistic competence of language models for Russian.

RuCoLA: Russian Corpus of Linguistic Acceptability

As pre-trained models have shown successful performance in program language processing as well as natural language processing, adversarial attacks on these models also attract attention.
However, previous works on black-box adversarial attacks generated adversarial examples in a very inefficient way with simple greedy search. 
They also failed to find out better adversarial examples because it was hard to reduce the search space without performance loss.
In this paper, we propose TABS, an efficient beam search black-box adversarial attack method. 
We adopt beam search to find out better adversarial examples, and contextual semantic filtering to effectively reduce the search space. 
Contextual semantic filtering reduces the number of candidate adversarial words considering the surrounding context and the semantic similarity.
Our proposed method shows good performance in terms of attack success rate, the number of queries, and semantic similarity in attacking models for two tasks: NL code search classification and retrieval tasks.

TABS: Efficient Textual Adversarial Attack for Pre-trained NL Code Model Using Semantic Beam Search

The primary goal of drug safety researchers and regulators is to promptly identify adverse drug reactions. Doing so may in turn prevent or reduce the harm to patients and ultimately improve public health. Evaluating and monitoring drug safety (i.e., pharmacovigilance) involves analyzing an ever growing collection of spontaneous reports from health professionals, physicians, and pharmacists, and information voluntarily submitted by patients. In this scenario, facilitating analysis of such reports via automation has the potential to rapidly identify safety signals. Unfortunately, public resources for developing natural language models for this task are scant. We present PHEE, a novel dataset for pharmacovigilance comprising over 5000 annotated events from medical case reports and biomedical literature, making it the largest such public dataset to date. We describe the hierarchical event schema designed to provide coarse and fine-grained information about patients' demographics, treatments and (side) effects. Along with the discussion of the dataset, we present a thorough experimental evaluation of current state-of-the-art approaches for biomedical event extraction, point out their limitations, and highlight open challenges to foster future research in this area.

PHEE: A Dataset for Pharmacovigilance Event Extraction from Text

Detractors of neural machine translation admit that while its translations are fluent, it sometimes gets key facts wrong. This is particularly important in simultaneous interpretation where translations have to be provided as fast as possible: before a sentence is complete. Yet, evaluations of simultaneous machine translation (SimulMT) fail to capture if systems correctly translate the most salient elements of a question: people, places, and dates. To address this problem, we introduce a downstream word-by-word question answering evaluation task (SimQA): given a source language question, translate the question word by word into the target language, and answer as soon as possible. SimQA jointly measures whether the SimulMT models translate the question quickly and accurately, and can reveal shortcomings in existing neural systems—hallucinating or omitting facts.

SimQA: Detecting Simultaneous MT Errors through Word-by-Word Question Answering

Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis is a dominant research area with potential applications in social media analytics, business, finance, and health. Prior works in this area are primarily based on supervised methods, with a few techniques using weak supervision limited to predicting a single aspect category per review sentence. In this paper, we present an extremely weakly supervised multi-label Aspect Category Sentiment Analysis framework which does not use any labelled data. We only rely on a single word per class as an initial indicative information. We further propose an automatic word selection technique to choose these seed categories and sentiment words. We explore unsupervised language model post-training to improve the overall performance, and propose a multi-label generator model to generate multiple aspect category-sentiment pairs per review sentence. Experiments conducted on four benchmark datasets showcase our method to outperform other weakly supervised baselines by a significant margin.

AX-MABSA: A Framework for Extremely Weakly Supervised Multi-label Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis

To facilitate conversational question answering (CQA) over hybrid contexts in finance, we present a new dataset, named PACIFIC. Compared with existing CQA datasets, PACIFIC exhibits three key features: (i) proactivity, (ii) numerical reasoning, and (iii) hybrid context of tables and text. A new task is defined accordingly to study Proactive Conversational Question Answering (PCQA), which combines clarification question generation and CQA. In addition, we propose a novel method, namely UniPCQA, to adapt a hybrid format of input and output content in PCQA into the Seq2Seq problem, including the reformulation of the numerical reasoning process as code generation. UniPCQA performs multi-task learning over all sub-tasks in PCQA and incorporates a simple ensemble strategy to alleviate the error propagation issue in the multi-task learning by cross-validating top-$k$ sampled Seq2Seq outputs. We benchmark the PACIFIC dataset with extensive baselines and provide comprehensive evaluations on each sub-task of PCQA.

PACIFIC: Towards Proactive Conversational Question Answering over Tabular and Textual Data in Finance

Few-shot relation extraction aims to learn to identify the relation between two entities based on very limited training examples. Recent efforts found that textual labels (i.e., relation names and relation descriptions) could be extremely useful for learning class representations, which will benefit the few-shot learning task. However, what is the best way to leverage such label information in the learning process is an important research question. Existing works largely assume such textual labels are always present during both learning and prediction. In this work, we argue that such approaches may not always lead to optimal results. Instead, we present a novel approach called label prompt dropout, which randomly removes label descriptions in the learning process. Our experiments show that our approach is able to lead to improved class representations, yielding significantly better results on the few-shot relation extraction task.

MasakhaNER 2.0: Africa-centric Transfer Learning for Named Entity Recognition

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McQueen: a Benchmark for Multimodal Conversational Query Rewrite

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MasakhaNER 2.0: Africa-centric Transfer Learning for Named Entity Recognition

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Next from EMNLP 2022

McQueen: a Benchmark for Multimodal Conversational Query Rewrite

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads