United Arab Emirates

Contrastive learning (CL) has brought significant progress to various NLP tasks. Despite such a progress, CL has not been applied to Arabic NLP. Nor is it clear how much benefits it could bring to particular classes of tasks such as social meaning (e.g., sentiment analysis, dialect identification, hate speech detection). In this work, we present a comprehensive benchmark study of state-of-the-art supervised CL methods on a wide array of Arabic social meaning tasks. Through an extensive empirical analysis, we show that CL methods outperform vanilla finetuning on most of the tasks. We also show that CL can be data efficient and quantify this efficiency, demonstrating the promise of these methods in low-resource settings vis-a-vis the particular downstream tasks (especially label granularity).

EMNLP 2022

A Benchmark Study of Contrastive Learning for Arabic Social Meaning

arabic social meaning

representation learning

contrastive learning

machine learning

benchmark

workshop paper

## 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.

In this paper, we present the results and findings of the Shared Task on Gender Rewriting, which was organized as part of the Seventh Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop. The task of gender rewriting refers to generating alternatives of a given sentence to match different target user gender contexts (e.g., a female speaker with a male listener, a male speaker with a male listener, etc.). This requires changing the grammatical gender (masculine or feminine) of certain words referring to the users. In this task, we focus on Arabic, a gender-marking morphologically rich language. A total of five teams from four countries participated in the shared task.

The Shared Task on Gender Rewriting

Propaganda is defined as an expression of opinion or action by individuals or groups deliberately designed to influence opinions or actions of other individuals or groups with reference to predetermined ends and this is achieved by means of well-defined rhetorical and psychological devices. Currently, propaganda (or persuasion) techniques have been commonly used on social media to manipulate or mislead social media users. Automatic detection of propaganda techniques from textual, visual, or multimodal content has been studied recently, however, major of such efforts are focused on English language content. In this paper, we propose a shared task on detecting propaganda techniques for Arabic textual content. We have done a pilot annotation of 200 Arabic tweets, which we plan to extend to 2,000 tweets, covering diverse topics.  We hope that the shared task will help in building a community for Arabic propaganda detection. The dataset will be made publicly available, which can help in future studies.

Overview of the WANLP 2022 Shared Task on Propaganda Detection in Arabic

We present our work on collecting ArzEn-ST, a code-switched Egyptian Arabic-English Speech Translation Corpus. This corpus is an extension of the ArzEn speech corpus, which was collected through informal interviews with bilingual speakers. In this work, we collect translations in both directions, monolingual Egyptian Arabic and monolingual English, forming a three-way speech translation corpus. We make the translation guidelines and corpus publicly available. We also report results for baseline systems for machine translation and speech translation tasks. We believe this is a valuable resource that can motivate and facilitate further research studying the code-switching phenomenon from a linguistic perspective and can be used to train and evaluate NLP systems.

ArzEn-ST: A Three-way Speech Translation Corpus for Code-Switched Egyptian Arabic-English

We present Maknuune, a large open lexicon for the Palestinian Arabic dialect. Maknuune  has over 36K entries from 17K lemmas, and 3.7K roots. All entries include diacritized Arabic orthography, phonological transcription and English glosses. Some entries are enriched with additional information such as broken plurals and templatic feminine forms, associated phrases and collocations, Standard Arabic glosses, and examples or notes on grammar, usage, or location of collected entry

Maknuune: A Large Open Palestinian Arabic Lexicon

This paper sheds light on an in-progress work for building a morphological analyzer for Egyptian Arabic (EGY). To build such a tool, a tag-set schema is developed depending on a corpus of 527,000 EGY words covering different sources and genres. This tag-set schema is used in annotating about 318,940 words, morphologically, according to their contexts. Each annotated word is associated with its suitable prefix(s), original stem, tag, suffix(s), glossary, number, gender, definiteness, and conventional lemma and stem. These morphologically annotated words, in turns, are used in developing the proposed morphological analyzer where the morphological lexicons and the compatibility tables are extracted and tested. The system is compared with one of best EGY morphological analyzers; CALIMA.

Developing a Tag-Set and Extracting the Morphological Lexicons to Build a Morphological Analyzer for Egyptian Arabic

Despite the noticeable progress that we recently witnessed in Arabic pre-trained language models (PLMs), the linguistic knowledge captured by these models remains unclear. In this paper, we conducted a study to evaluate available Arabic PLMs in terms of their linguistic knowledge. BERT-based language models (LMs) are evaluated using Minimum Pairs (MP), where each pair represents a grammatical sentence and its contradictory counterpart. MPs isolate specific linguistic knowledge to test the model's sensitivity in understanding a specific linguistic phenomenon. We cover nine major Arabic phenomena: Verbal sentences, Nominal sentences, Adjective Modification, and Idafa construction. The experiments compared the results of fifteen Arabic BERT-based PLMs. Overall, among all tested models, CAMeL-CA outperformed the other PLMs by achieving the highest overall accuracy.

Assessing the Linguistic Knowledge in Arabic Pre-trained Language Models Using Minimal Pairs

We describe a corpus of social media posts that include utterances in Arabizi, a Roman-script rendering of Arabic, mixed with other languages, notably English, French, and Arabic written in the Arabic script. We manually annotated a subset of the texts with word-level language IDs; this is a non-trivial task due to the nature of mixed-language writing, especially on social media. We developed classifiers that can accurately predict the language ID tags. Then, we extended the word-level predictions to identify sentences that include Arabizi (and code-switching), and applied the classifiers to the raw corpus, thereby harvesting a large number of additional instances. The result is a large-scale dataset of Arabizi, with precise indications of code-switching between Arabizi and English, French, and Arabic.

Identifying Code-switching in Arabizi

Arabic is a Semitic language, considered to be one of the most complex languages in the world due to its unique composition and complex linguistic features. It consequently causes challenges for verifying the authorship of Arabic texts, requiring extensive research and development. This paper presents a new knowledge-based model to enhance Natural Language Understanding and thereby improve authorship verification performance. The proposed model provided promising results that would benefit the Arabic research for different Natural Language Processing tasks.

Authorship Verification for Arabic Short Texts Using Arabic Knowledge-Base Model (AraKB)

In the online world, Machine Translation (MT) systems are extensively used to translate User-Generated Text (UGT) such as reviews, tweets, and social media posts, where the main message is often the author's positive or negative attitude towards the topic of the text. However, MT systems still lack accuracy in some low-resource languages and sometimes make critical translation errors that completely flip the sentiment polarity of the target word or phrase and hence delivers a wrong affect message. This is particularly noticeable in texts that do not follow common lexico-grammatical standards such as the dialectical Arabic (DA) used on online platforms. In this research, we aim to improve the translation of sentiment in UGT written in the dialectical versions of the Arabic language to English. Given the scarcity of gold-standard parallel data for DA-EN in the UGT domain, we introduce a semi-supervised approach that exploits both monolingual and parallel data for training an NMT system initialised by a cross-lingual language model trained with  supervised and unsupervised modeling objectives. We assess the accuracy of sentiment translation by our proposed system through a numerical ‘sentiment-closeness' measure as well as human evaluation. We will show that our semi-supervised MT system can significantly help with correcting sentiment errors detected in the online translation of dialectical Arabic UGT.

A Semi-supervised Approach for a Better Translation of Sentiment in Dialectical Arabic UGT

We investigate part of speech tagging for four Arabic dialects (Gulf, Levantine, Egyptian, and Maghrebi), in an out-of-domain setting. More specifically, we look at the effectiveness of 1) upsampling the target dialect in the training data of a joint model, 2) increasing the consistency of the  annotations, and 3) using  word embeddings pre-trained on a large corpus of dialectal Arabic. We increase the accuracy on average by about 20 percentage points.

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The Shared Task on Gender Rewriting

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Next from EMNLP 2022

The Shared Task on Gender Rewriting

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

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