United Arab Emirates

The most prominent tasks in emotion analysis are to assign emotions to texts and to understand how emotions manifest in language. An important observation for natural language processing is that emotions can be communicated implicitly by referring to events alone, appealing to an empathetic, intersubjective understanding of events, even without explicitly mentioning an emotion name. In psychology, the class of emotion theories known as appraisal theories aims at explaining the link between events and emotions. Appraisals can be formalized as variables that measure a cognitive evaluation by people living through an event that they consider relevant. They include the assessment if an event is novel, if the person considers themselves to be responsible, if it is in line with the own goals, and many others. Such appraisals explain which emotions are developed based on an event, e.g., that a novel situation can induce surprise or one with uncertain consequences could evoke fear. We analyze the suitability of appraisal theories for emotion analysis in text with the goal of understanding if appraisal concepts can reliably be reconstructed by annotators, if they can be predicted by text classifiers, and if appraisal concepts help to identify emotion categories. To achieve that, we compile a corpus by asking people to textually describe events that triggered particular emotions and to disclose their appraisals. Then, we ask readers to reconstruct emotions and appraisals from the text. This setup allows us to measure if emotions and appraisals can be recovered purely from text and provides a human baseline to judge model’s performance measures. Our comparison of text classification methods to human annotators shows that both can reliably detect emotions and appraisals with similar performance. Therefore, appraisals constitute an alternative computational emotion analysis paradigm and further improve the categorization of emotions in text with joint models.

EMNLP 2022

Dimensional Modeling of Emotions in Text with Appraisal Theories: Corpus Creation, Annotation Reliability, and Prediction

appraisal

events

emotion

reliability

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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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.

Twitter data have become essential to Natural
Language Processing (NLP) and social science research, driving various scientific discoveries in recent years. 
However, the textual data alone are often not enough to conduct studies: especially, social scientists need more variables to perform their analysis and control for various factors. How we augment this information, such as users' location, age, or tweet sentiment, has ramifications for anonymity and reproducibility, and requires dedicated effort. This paper describes Twitter Demographer, a simple, flow-based tool to enrich Twitter data with additional information about tweets and users. Twitter Demographer is aimed at NLP practitioners, psycho-linguists, and (computational) social scientists who want to enrich their datasets with aggregated information, facilitating reproducibility, and providing algorithmic privacy-by-design measures for pseudo-anonymity. We discuss our design choices, inspired by the flow-based programming paradigm, to use black-box components that can easily be chained together and extended. We also analyze the ethical issues related to the use of this tool, and the built-in measures to facilitate pseudo-anonymity.

Twitter-Demographer: A Flow-based Tool to Enrich Twitter Data

We recently introduced DRaiL, a declarative neuro-symbolic modeling framework designed to support a wide variety of NLP scenarios. In this demo, we enhance DRaiL with an easy to use Python interface equipped with methods to define, modify and augment models interactively, as well as with methods to debug and visualize the predictions made. We demonstrate this interface with two challenging NLP tasks: analyzing moral sentiment in political discourse, and analyzing opinions about the Covid-19 vaccine.

Hands-On Interactive Neuro-Symbolic NLP with DRaiL

We describe the AGREE system, which takes user-submitted passages as input and automatically generates grammar practice exercises that can be completed while reading. Multiple-choice practice items are generated for a variety of different grammar constructs: punctuation, articles, conjunctions, pronouns, prepositions, verbs, and nouns. We also conducted a large-scale human evaluation with around 4,500 multiple-choice practice items. We notice for 95% of items, a majority of raters out of five were able to identify the correct answer and for 85% of cases, raters agree that there is only one correct answer among the choices. Finally, the error analysis shows that raters made the most mistakes for punctuation and conjunctions.

AGReE: A system for generating Automated Grammar Reading Exercises

Automatic essay evaluation can help reduce teachers' workload and enable students to refine their works rapidly. Previous studies focus mainly on giving discrete scores for either the holistic quality or several distinct traits. However, real-world teachers usually provide detailed comments in natural language, which are more informative than single scores. In this paper, we present the comment generation task, which aims to generate comments for specified segments from given student narrative essays. To tackle this task, we propose a planning-based generation model, which first plans a sequence of keywords, and then expands these keywords into a complete comment. To improve the correctness and informativeness of generated comments, we adopt two following techniques: (1) training an error correction module to filter out incorrect keywords, and (2) recognizing fine-grained structured features from source essays to enrich the keywords. To support the evaluation of the task, we collect a human-written Chinese dataset, which contains 22,399 essay-comment pairs. Extensive experiments show that our model outperforms strong baselines significantly. Moreover, we exert explicit control on our model to generate comments to describe the strengths or weaknesses of inputs with a 91\% success rate.

Automatic Comment Generation for Chinese Student Narrative Essays

We present POTATO, the Portable text annotation tool, a free, fully open-sourced annotation system that 1) supports labeling many types of text and multimodal data; 2) offers easy-to-configure features to maximize the productivity of both deployers and annotators (convenient templates for common ML/NLP tasks, active learning, keypress shortcuts, keyword highlights, tooltips); and 3) supports a high degree of customization (editable UI, inserting pre-screening questions, attention and qualification tests). Experiments over two annotation tasks suggest that POTATO improves labeling speed through its specially-designed productivity features, especially for long documents and complex tasks. POTATO is available at https://github.com/davidjurgens/ potato and will continue to be updated.

POTATO: The Portable Text Annotation Tool

We introduce VL-CheckList, a toolbox for evaluating Vision-Language Pretraining (VLP) models, along with a benchmark dataset for fine-grained VLP model analysis. Most existing VLP models evaluate their performance by comparing the fine-tuned downstream task performance. However, only average downstream task accuracy provides little information about the pros and cons of each VLP method. In this paper, we demonstrate how minor input changes in language and vision will affect the prediction outputs. We also provide a guideline for the research community to utilizes and contributes to this toolbox. Lastly, a case study based on VL-CheckList is conducted to analyze one of the representative VLP models. Data and code are available at https://github.com/om-ai-lab/VL-CheckList

An Explainable Toolbox for Evaluating Pre-trained Vision-Language Models

We present a hybrid approach for product review summarization which consists of: (i) an unsupervised extractive step to extract the most important sentences out of all the reviews, and (ii) a supervised abstractive step to summarize the extracted sentences into a coherent short summary. This approach allows us to develop an efficient cross-lingual abstractive summarizer that can generate summaries in any language, given the extracted sentences out of thousands of reviews in a source language. In order to train and test the abstractive model, we create the Cross-lingual Amazon Reviews Summarization (CARS) dataset which provides English summaries for training, and English, French, Italian, Arabic, and Hindi summaries for testing based on selected English reviews. We show that the summaries generated by our model are as good as human written summaries in coherence, informativeness, non-redundancy, and fluency.

A Hybrid Approach to Cross-lingual Product Review Summarization

Online relevance matching is an essential task of e-commerce product search to boost the utility of search engines and ensure a smooth user experience. Previous work adopts either classical relevance matching models or Transformer-style models to address it. However, they ignore the inherent bipartite graph structures that are ubiquitous in e-commerce product search logs and are too inefficient to deploy online. In this paper, we design an efficient knowledge distillation framework for e-commerce relevance matching to integrate the respective advantages of Transformer-style models and classical relevance matching models. Especially for the core student model of the framework, we propose a novel method using k-order relevance modeling. The experimental results on large-scale real-world data (the size is 6~174 million) show that the proposed method significantly improves the prediction accuracy in terms of human relevance judgment. We deploy our method to JD.com online search platform. The A/B testing results show that our method significantly improves most business metrics under price sort mode and default sort mode.

Knowledge Distillation based Contextual Relevance Matching for E-commerce Product Search

Temporal aspect is one of the most challenging areas in Natural Language Interface to Databases (NLIDB). This paper addresses and examines how temporal questions being studied and supported by the research community at both levels: popular annotated dataset (e.g. Spider) and recent advanced models. We present a new dataset with accompanied databases supporting temporal questions in NLIDB. We experiment with two SOTA models (Picard and ValueNet) to investigate how our new dataset helps these models learn and improve performance in temporal aspect.

Tackling Temporal Questions in Natural Language Interface to Databases

In this work, we build a dense retrieval based semantic search engine on scientific articles from Elsevier. The major challenge is that there is no labeled data for training and testing. We apply a state-of-the-art unsupervised dense retrieval model called Generative Pseudo Labeling that generates high-quality pseudo training labels. Furthermore, since the articles are unbalanced across different domains, we select passages from multiple domains to form balanced training data. For the evaluation, we create two test sets: one manually annotated and one automatically created from the meta-information of our data. We compare the semantic search engine with the currently deployed lexical search engine on the two test sets. The results of the experiment show that the semantic search engine trained with pseudo training labels can significantly improve search performance.

Dimensional Modeling of Emotions in Text with Appraisal Theories: Corpus Creation, Annotation Reliability, and Prediction

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Twitter-Demographer: A Flow-based Tool to Enrich Twitter Data

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Dimensional Modeling of Emotions in Text with Appraisal Theories: Corpus Creation, Annotation Reliability, and Prediction

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Next from EMNLP 2022

Twitter-Demographer: A Flow-based Tool to Enrich Twitter Data

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads