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While transformer-based systems have enabled greater accuracies with fewer training examples, data acquisition obstacles still persist for rare-class tasks -- when the class label is very infrequent (e.g. &lt; 5% of samples). Active learning has in general been proposed to alleviate such challenges, but choice of selection strategy, the criteria by which rare-class examples are chosen, has not been systematically evaluated. Further, transformers enable iterative transfer-learning approaches. We propose and investigate transfer- and active learning solutions to the rare class problem of dissonance detection through utilizing models trained on closely related tasks and the evaluation of acquisition strategies, including a proposed probability-of-rare-class (PRC) approach. We perform these experiments for a specific rare-class problem: collecting language samples of cognitive dissonance from social media. We find that PRC is a simple and effective strategy to guide annotations and ultimately improve model accuracy while transfer-learning in a specific order can improve the cold-start performance of the learner but does not benefit iterations of active learning.

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ACL 2023

Transfer and Active Learning for Dissonance Detection: Addressing the Rare-Class Challenge

cognitive

computational social science

annotation

transfer learning

low-resource

active learning

While transformer-based systems have enabled greater accuracies with fewer training examples, data acquisition obstacles still persist for rare-class tasks -- when the class label is very infrequent (e.g. < 5% of samples). Active learning has in general been proposed to alleviate such challenges, but choice of selection strategy, the criteria by which rare-class examples are chosen, has not been systematically evaluated. Further, transformers enable iterative transfer-learning approaches. We propose and investigate transfer- and active learning solutions to the rare class problem of dissonance detection through utilizing models trained on closely related tasks and the evaluation of acquisition strategies, including a proposed probability-of-rare-class (PRC) approach. We perform these experiments for a specific rare-class problem: collecting language samples of cognitive dissonance from social media. We find that PRC is a simple and effective strategy to guide annotations and ultimately improve model accuracy while transfer-learning in a specific order can improve the cold-start performance of the learner but does not benefit iterations of active learning.

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poster

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
<br>The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023.<br><br>
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience.<br>
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**
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The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

Video-grounded dialogue understanding is a challenging problem that requires machine to perceive, parse and reason over situated semantics extracted from weakly aligned video and dialogues. Most existing benchmarks treat both modalities the same as a frame-independent visual understanding task, while neglecting the intrinsic attributes in multimodal dialogues, such as scene and topic transitions. In this paper, we present \textbf{\underline{V}ideo-grounded \underline{S}cene\&\underline{T}opic \underline{A}wa\underline{R}e dialogue~(VSTAR)} dataset, a large scale video-grounded dialogue understanding dataset based on 395 TV series. Based on VSTAR, we propose two benchmarks for video-grounded dialogue understanding: scene segmentation and topic segmentation, and one benchmark for video-grounded dialogue generation. Comprehensive experiments are performed on these benchmarks to demonstrate the importance of multimodal information and segments in video-grounded dialogue understanding and generation.

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VSTAR: A Video-grounded Dialogue Dataset for Situated Semantic Understanding with Scene and Topic Transitions

We present PATRON, a prompt-based data selection method for pre-trained language model fine-tuning under cold-start scenarios, i.e., no initial labeled data are available. In PATRON, we design (1) a prompt-based uncertainty propagation approach to estimate the importance of data points and (2) a partition-then-rewrite (PTR) strategy to promote sample diversity when querying for annotations. Experiments on six text classification datasets show that PATRON outperforms the strongest cold-start data selection baselines by up to 6.9%. Besides, with 128 labels only, PATRON achieves 91.0% and 92.1\% of the fully supervised performance based on vanilla fine-tuning and prompt-based learning respectively. Our implementation of PATRON will be published upon acceptance.

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Cold-Start Data Selection for Better Few-shot Language Model Fine-tuning: A Prompt-based Uncertainty Propagation Approach

Recent research has suggested that there are clear differences in the language used in the Dark Web compared to that of the Surface Web. As studies on the Dark Web commonly require textual analysis of the domain, language models specific to the Dark Web may provide valuable insights to researchers. In this work, we introduce DarkBERT, a language model pretrained on Dark Web data. We describe the steps taken to filter and compile the text data used to train DarkBERT to combat the extreme lexical and structural diversity of the Dark Web that may be detrimental to building a proper representation of the domain. We evaluate DarkBERT and its vanilla counterpart along with other widely used language models to validate the benefits that a Dark Web domain specific model offers in various use cases. Our evaluations show that DarkBERT outperforms current language models and may serve as a valuable resource for future research on the Dark Web.

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DarkBERT: A Language Model for the Dark Side of the Internet

Span identification aims at identifying specific text spans from text input and classifying them into pre-defined categories. Different from previous works that merely leverage the Subordinate (SUB) relation (i.e. if a span is an instance of a certain category) to train models, this paper for the first time explores the Peer (PR) relation, which indicates that two spans are instances of the same category and share similar features. Specifically, a novel Peer Data Augmentation (PeerDA) approach is proposed which employs span pairs with the PR relation as the augmentation data for training. PeerDA has two unique advantages: (1) There are a large number of PR span pairs for augmenting the training data. (2) The augmented data can prevent the trained model from over-fitting the superficial span-category mapping by pushing the model to leverage the span semantics. Experimental results on ten datasets over four diverse tasks across seven domains demonstrate the effectiveness of PeerDA. Notably, PeerDA achieves state-of-the-art results on six of them.

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PeerDA: Data Augmentation via Modeling Peer Relation for Span Identification Tasks

For many real-world applications, the user-generated inputs usually contain various noises due to speech recognition errors caused by linguistic variations or typographical errors (typos). Thus, it is crucial to test model performance on data with realistic input noises to ensure robustness and fairness. However, little study has been done to construct such benchmarks for Chinese, where various language-specific input noises happen in the real world. In order to fill this important gap, we construct READIN: a Chinese multi-task benchmark with REalistic And Diverse Input Noises. READIN contains four diverse tasks and requests annotators to re-enter the original test data with two commonly used Chinese input methods: Pinyin input and speech input. We designed our annotation pipeline to maximize diversity, for example by instructing the annotators to use diverse input method editors (IMEs) for keyboard noises and recruiting speakers from diverse dialectical groups for speech noises. We experiment with a series of strong pretrained language models as well as robust training methods, we find that these models often suffer significant performance drops on READIN even with robustness methods like data augmentation. As the first large-scale attempt in creating a benchmark with noises geared towards user-generated inputs, we believe that READIN serves as an important complement to existing Chinese NLP benchmarks. The source code and dataset can be obtained from https://github.com/ thunlp/READIN.

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READIN: A Chinese Multi-Task Benchmark with Realistic and Diverse Input Noises

We study few-shot reranking for multi-hop QA (MQA) with open-domain questions. To alleviate the need for a large number of labeled question-document pairs for retriever training, we propose PromptRank, which relies on language model prompting for multi-hop path reranking. PromptRank first constructs an instruction-based prompt that includes a candidate document path and then computes the relevance score between a given question and the path based on the conditional likelihood of the question given the path prompt according to a language model. PromptRank yields strong retrieval performance on HotpotQA with only 128 training examples compared to state-of-the-art methods trained on thousands of examples --- 73.6 recall@10 by PromptRank vs. 77.8 by PathRetriever and 77.5 by multi-hop dense retrieval.

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Few-shot Reranking for Multi-hop QA via Language Model Prompting

Current relation extraction methods suffer from the inadequacy of large-scale annotated data.While distant supervision alleviates the problem of data quantities, there still exists domain disparity in data qualities due to its reliance on domain-restrained knowledge bases. In this work, we propose S2ynRE, a framework of two-stage Self-training with Synthetic data for Relation Extraction.We first leverage the capability of large language models to adapt to the target domain and automatically synthesize large quantities of coherent, realistic training data.We then propose an accompanied two-stage self-training algorithm that iteratively and alternately learns from synthetic and golden data together.We conduct comprehensive experiments and detailed ablations on popular relation extraction datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

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S2ynRE: Two-stage Self-training with Synthetic data for Low-resource Relation Extraction

Sequence-to-Sequence (S2S) models have achieved remarkable success on various text generation tasks. However, learning complex structures with S2S models remains challenging as external neural modules and additional lexicons are often supplemented to predict non-textual outputs. We present a systematic study of S2S modeling using contained decoding on four core tasks: part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, constituency and dependency parsing, to develop efficient exploitation methods costing zero extra parameters. In particular, 3 lexically diverse linearization schemas and corresponding constrained decoding methods are designed and evaluated. Experiments show that although more lexicalized schemas yield longer output sequences that require heavier training, their sequences being closer to natural language makes them easier to learn. Moreover, S2S models using our constrained decoding outperform other S2S approaches using external resources. Our best models perform better than or comparably to the state-of-the-art for all 4 tasks, lighting a promise for S2S models to generate non-sequential structures. 

Unleashing the True Potential of Sequence-to-Sequence Models for Sequence Tagging and Structure Parsing

Disagreement in natural language annotation has been predominantly studied from a perspective of biases introduced by the annotators and the annotation frameworks. Here, wepropose to analyze another source of bias: task design bias,which has a particularly strong impact on crowdsourcing linguistic annotations where natural language is used to elicit the interpretation of laymen annotators. For this purpose we look at implicit discourse relation annotation, a task that has repeatedly been shown to be difficult due to the relations' ambiguity. We compare the annotations of 1,200 discourse relations obtained using two distinct discourse relation annotation tasks and quantify the biases of both methods across four different domains. Both methods are natural language annotation tasks designed for crowdsourcing: one reformulating discourse segments as questions and answers and one using discourse connective insertion. We show that the task design can push annotators towards certain relations and that some discourse relations senses can be better elicited with the one or the other NL annotation approach.We also conclude that this type of bias should be taken into account when training and testing models.

Design Choices for Crowdsourcing Implicit Discourse Relations: Revealing the Biases introduced by Task Design

This study proposes a new multimodal neural machine translation (MNMT) model using synthetic images transformed by a latent diffusion model. MNMT translates a source language sentence based on its related image, but the image usually contains noisy information that are not relevant to the source language sentence.Our proposed method first generates a synthetic image corresponding to the content of the source language sentence by using a latent diffusion model and then performs translation based on the synthetic image. The experiments on the English-German translation tasks using the Multi30k dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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Transfer and Active Learning for Dissonance Detection: Addressing the Rare-Class Challenge

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