Croatia

EACL 2023

A Survey of Text Games for Reinforcement Learning Informed by Natural Language

text games

language

natural language processing

reinforcement learning

poster

### Welcome to the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 
Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

Past studies on the ICD coding problem focus on predicting clinical codes primarily based on the discharge summary. This covers only a small fraction of the notes generated during each hospital stay and leaves potential for improving performance by analysing all the available clinical notes. We propose a hierarchical transformer architecture that uses text across the entire sequence of clinical notes in each hospital stay for ICD coding, and incorporates embeddings for text metadata such as their position, time, and type of note. While using all clinical notes increases the quantity of data substantially, superconvergence can be used to reduce training costs. We evaluate the model on the MIMIC-III dataset. Our model exceeds the prior state-of-the-art when using only discharge summaries as input, and achieves further performance improvements when all clinical notes are used as input.

Modelling Temporal Document Sequences for Clinical ICD Coding

The best methods for knowledge graph completion use a `dual-encoding' framework, a form of neural model with a bottleneck that facilitates fast approximate search over a vast collection of candidates. These approaches are trained using contrastive learning to differentiate between known positive examples and sampled negative instances. The mechanism for sampling negatives to date has been very simple, driven by pragmatic engineering considerations (e.g., using mismatched instances from the same batch). 
We propose several novel means of finding more informative negatives, based on searching for candidates with high lexical overlaps, from the dual-encoder model and according to knowledge graph structures. 
Experimental results on four benchmarks show that our best single model improves consistently over previous methods and obtains new state-of-the-art performance, including the challenging large-scale Wikidata5M dataset. Combing different kinds of strategies through model ensembling results in a further performance boost.

Don't Mess with Mister-in-Between: Improved Negative Search for Knowledge Graph Completion

There is increasing interest to work with user generated content in social media, especially textual posts over time. Currently there is no consistent way of segmenting user posts into timelines in a meaningful way that improves the quality and cost of manual annotation. Here we propose a set of methods for segmenting longitudinal user posts into timelines likely to contain interesting moments of change in a user's behaviour, based on their online posting activity. We also propose a novel framework for evaluating timelines and show its applicability in the context of two different social media datasets. Finally, we present a discussion of the linguistic content of highly ranked timelines.

Creation and evaluation of timelines for longitudinal user posts

We explore the idea of incorporating concepts from writing skills curricula into human-machine collaborative writing scenarios, focusing on adding writing modes as a control for text generation models. 
Using crowd-sourced workers, we annotate a corpus of narrative text paragraphs with writing mode labels. 
Classifiers trained on this data achieve an average accuracy of \textasciitilde{}87\% on held-out data. 
We fine-tune a set of large language models to condition on writing mode labels, and show that the generated text is recognized as belonging to the specified mode with high accuracy.

To study the ability of writing modes to provide fine-grained control over generated text, we devise a novel turn-based text reconstruction game to evaluate the difference between the generated text and the author's intention. 
We show that authors prefer text suggestions made by writing mode-controlled models on average 61.1\% of the time, with satisfaction scores 0.5 higher on a 5-point ordinal scale. 
When evaluated by humans, stories generated via collaboration with writing mode-controlled models achieve high similarity with the professionally written target story. 
We conclude by identifying the most common mistakes found in the generated stories.

Fiction-Writing Mode: An Effective Control for Human-Machine Collaborative Writing

Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) capture a user preference through a conversation. However, the existing CRSs lack capturing comprehensive user preferences. This is because the items mentioned in a conversation are mainly regarded as a user preference. Thus, they have limitations in identifying a user preference from a dialogue context expressed without preferred items. Inspired by the characteristic of an online recommendation community where participants identify a context of a recommendation request and then comment with appropriate items, we exploit the Reddit data. Specifically, we propose a Contrastive Learning approach for Injecting Contextual Knowledge (CLICK) from the Reddit data to the CRS task, which facilitates the capture of a context-level user preference from a dialogue context, regardless of the existence of preferred item-entities. Moreover, we devise a relevance-enhanced contrastive learning loss to consider the fine-grained reflection of multiple recommendable items. We further develop a response generation module to generate a persuasive rationale for a recommendation. Extensive experiments on the benchmark CRS dataset show the effectiveness of CLICK, achieving significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods.

CLICK: Contrastive Learning for Injecting Contextual Knowledge to Conversational Recommender System

WebAnno is one of the most popular annotation tools that supports generic annotation types and distributive annotation with multiple user roles. However, WebAnno focuses on annotating span-level mentions and relations among them, making document-level annotation complicated. When it comes to the annotation and analysis of social science materials, it usually involves the creation of codes to categorize a given document. The codes, which are known as codebooks, are typically hierarchical, which enables to code the document either with a general category or more fine-grained subcategories. CodeAnno is forked from WebAnno and designed to solve the coding problems faced by many social science researchers with the following main functionalities. 1) Creation of hierarchical codebooks, with functionality to move and sort categories in the hierarchy 2) an interactive UI for codebook annotation 3) import and export of annotations in CSV format, hence being compatible with existing annotations conducted using spreadsheet applications 4) integration of an external automation component to facilitate coding using machine learning 5) project templating that allows duplicating a project structure without copying the actual documents. We present different use-cases to demonstrate the capability of CodeAnno.

CodeAnno: Extending WebAnno with Hierarchical Document Level Annotation and Automation

NLP Workbench is a web-based platform for text mining that allows non-expert users to obtain semantic understanding of large-scale corpora using state-of-the-art text mining models. The platform is built upon latest pre-trained models and open source systems from academia that provides semantic analysis functionalities, including but not limited to entity linking, sentiment analysis, semantic parsing, and relation extraction. Its extensible design enables researchers and developers to smoothly replace an existing model or integrate a new one. To improve efficiency, we employ a microservice architecture that facilitates allocation of acceleration hardware and parallelization of computation. This paper presents the architecture of NLP Workbench and discusses the challenges we faced in designing it. We also discuss diverse use cases of NLP Workbench and the benefits of using it over other approaches. The platform is under active development, with its source code released under the MIT license. A website and a short video demonstrating our platform are also available.

NLP Workbench: Efficient and Extensible Integration of State-of-the-art Text Mining Tools

Topic Modeling has been adopted as a widespread technique for the unsupervised analysis of any set of unstructured data in many fields; yet, obtaining accurate results and useful models is not always straightforward to achieve, especially for individuals who are domain experts in their research area, but do not possess the necessary knowledge for the optimization of the parameters required by this NLP technique. From this perspective, we introduce an Interactive Topic Model Trainer (ITMT) developed within the EU-funded project IntelComp. ITMT is a user-in-the-loop topic modeling tool presented with a graphical user interface, that allows the training and curation of different state-of-the-art topic extraction libraries, including some recent neural-based methods, oriented toward the usage by domain experts. ITMT’s functionalities and key implementation aspects are reviewed in this paper, including a comparison with other tools for topic modeling analysis.

ITMT: Interactive Topic Model Trainer

In this demo, we introduce a web-based misinformation detection system PANACEA on COVID-19 related claims, which has two modules, fact-checking and rumour detection. Our fact-checking module, which is supported by novel natural language inference methods with a self-attention network, outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. It is also able to give automated veracity assessment and ranked supporting evidence with the stance towards the claim to be checked. In addition, PANACEA adapts the bi-directional graph convolutional networks model, which is able to detect rumours based on comment networks of related tweets, instead of relying on the knowledge base. This rumour detection module assists by warning the users in the early stages when a knowledge base may not be available.

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Modelling Temporal Document Sequences for Clinical ICD Coding

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