Canada

This work introduces the D-WISE Tool Suite (DWTS), a novel working environment for digital qualitative discourse analysis in the Digital Humanities (DH). The DWTS addresses limitations of current DH tools induced by the ever-increasing amount of heterogeneous, unstructured, and multi-modal data in which the discourses of contemporary societies are encoded. To provide meaningful insights from such data, our system leverages and combines state-of-the-art machine learning technologies from Natural Language Processing and Com-
puter Vision. Further, the DWTS is conceived and developed by an interdisciplinary team of
cultural anthropologists and computer scientists to ensure the tool&#39;s usability for modern
DH research. Central features of the DWTS are: a) import of multi-modal data like text, image, audio, and video b) preprocessing pipelines for automatic annotations c) lexical and semantic search of documents d) manual span, bounding box, time-span, and frame annotations e) documentation of the research process.

&lt;iframe src=&quot;https://app.sli.do/event/qQ87ZDnDYN6cfmCQWHFaok/embed/polls/0c460713-8008-4a92-85d5-b7758c2d4669&quot; width=&quot;300&quot; height=&quot;400&quot;&gt;&lt;/iframe&gt;

ACL 2023

The D-WISE Tool Suite: Multi-Modal Machine-Learning-Powered Tools Supporting and Enhancing Digital Discourse Analysis

toolsuite

dwts

multi-modal

annotation

This work introduces the D-WISE Tool Suite (DWTS), a novel working environment for digital qualitative discourse analysis in the Digital Humanities (DH). The DWTS addresses limitations of current DH tools induced by the ever-increasing amount of heterogeneous, unstructured, and multi-modal data in which the discourses of contemporary societies are encoded. To provide meaningful insights from such data, our system leverages and combines state-of-the-art machine learning technologies from Natural Language Processing and Com-
puter Vision. Further, the DWTS is conceived and developed by an interdisciplinary team of
cultural anthropologists and computer scientists to ensure the tool's usability for modern
DH research. Central features of the DWTS are: a) import of multi-modal data like text, image, audio, and video b) preprocessing pipelines for automatic annotations c) lexical and semantic search of documents d) manual span, bounding box, time-span, and frame annotations e) documentation of the research process.

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demo

### 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)**
<br><br><br><br>

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.

We present a simple and unified approach for both continuous and discontinuous constituency parsing via autoregressive span selection. Constituency parsing aims to produce a set of non-crossing spans so that they can form a constituency parse tree. We sort gold spans using a predefined order and leverage a pointer network to autoregressively select spans by that order. To deal with discontinuous spans, we consecutively select their subspans from left to right, label all but last subspans with special discontinuous labels and the last subspan as the whole discontinuous spans' labels. We use simple heuristic to output valid trees so that our approach is able to predict all possible continuous and discontinuous constituency trees without sacrificing data coverage and without the need to use expensive chart-based parsing algorithms. Experiments on multiple continuous and discontinuous benchmarks show that our model achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/9yzqPifSAmy9Efyrt2gEbX/embed/polls/114a72e4-5c5f-4812-b87e-28c2d4c6264b" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Don't Parse, Choose Spans! Continuous and Discontinuous Constituency Parsing via Autoregressive Span Selection

Natural language is ambiguous. Resolving ambiguous questions is key to successfully answering them.Focusing on questions about images, we create a dataset of ambiguous examples. We annotate these, grouping answers by the underlying question they address and rephrasing the question for each group to reduce ambiguity. Our analysis reveals a linguistically-aligned ontology of reasons for ambiguity in visual questions. We then develop an English question-generation model which we demonstrate via automatic and human evaluation produces less ambiguous questions. We further show that the question generation objective we use allows the model to integrate answer group information without any direct supervision.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/eX4PwSmcCc1EvCqjxcYdKB/embed/polls/6a984219-f306-479f-980b-8a692db6dd0a" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road? Rephrasing and Analyzing Ambiguous Questions in VQA

Stance detection aims to detect the stance toward a corresponding target. Existing works use the assumption that the target is known in advance, which is often not the case in the wild. Given a text from social media platforms, the target information is often unknown due to implicit mentions in the source text and it is infeasible to have manual target annotations at a large scale. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new task Target-Stance Extraction (TSE) that aims to extract the (target, stance) pair from the text. We benchmark the task by proposing a two-stage framework that first identifies the relevant target in the text and then detects the stance given the predicted target and text. Specifically, we first propose two different settings: Target Classification and Target Generation, to identify the potential target from a given text. Then we propose a multi-task approach that takes target prediction as the auxiliary task to detect the stance toward the predicted target. We evaluate the proposed framework on both in-target stance detection in which the test target is always seen in the training stage and zero-shot stance detection that needs to detect the stance for the targets that are unseen during the training phase. The new TSE task can facilitate future research in the field of stance detection.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/t38CPUax2NoHBQcXN6okdA/embed/polls/f6bbc0f0-3201-4872-8621-0564f6d4b66e" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

A New Direction in Stance Detection: Target-Stance Extraction in the Wild

Knowledge distillation (KD) is the process of transferring knowledge from a large model to a small one.It has gained increasing attention in the natural language processing community, driven by the demands of compressing ever-growing language models. In this work, we propose an FDISTILL framework, which formulates sequential knowledge distillation as minimizing a generalized f-divergence function. We propose four distilling variants under our framework and show that existing SeqKD and ENGINE approaches are approximations of our FDISTILL methods. We further derive step-wise decomposition for our FDISTILL, reducing intractable sequence-level divergence to word-level losses that can be computed in a tractable manner. Experiments across four datasets show that our methods outperform existing KD approaches, and that our symmetric distilling losses can better force the student to learn from the teacher distribution.

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f-Divergence Minimization for Sequence-Level Knowledge Distillation

The Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) task pertains to the identification of entities or relations in texts that were not seen during training. ZSL has emerged as a critical research area due to the scarcity of labeled data in specific domains, and its applications have grown significantly in recent years. With the advent of large pretrained language models, several novel methods have been proposed, resulting in substantial improvements in ZSL performance. There is a growing demand, both in the research community and industry, for a comprehensive ZSL framework that facilitates the development and accessibility of the latest methods and pretrained models.
In this study, we propose a novel ZSL framework called Zshot that aims to address the aforementioned challenges. Our primary objective is to provide a platform that allows researchers to compare different state-of-the-art ZSL methods with standard benchmark datasets. Additionally, we have designed our framework to support the industry with readily available APIs for production under the standard SpaCy NLP pipeline. Our API is extendible and evaluable, moreover, we include numerous enhancements such as boosting the accuracy with pipeline ensembling and visualization utilities available as a SpaCy extension.

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Zshot: An Open-source Framework for Zero-Shot Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction

Heterogenity of data-to-text generation datasets limits the research on data-to-text generation systems. We present TabGenie -- a toolkit which enables researchers to explore, preprocess, and analyze a variety of data-to-text generation datasets through the unified framework of table-to-text generation. In TabGenie, all inputs are represented as tables with associated metadata. The tables can be explored through a web interface, which also provides an interactive mode for debugging table-to-text generation, facilitates side-by-side comparison of generated system outputs, and allows easy exports for manual analysis. Furthermore, TabGenie is equipped with command line processing tools and Python bindings for unified dataset loading and processing. We release TabGenie as a PyPI package and provide its open-source code and a live demo at https://github.com/kasnerz/tabgenie.

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TabGenie: A Toolkit for Table-to-Text Generation

Online conversation is a ubiquitous way to share information and connect everyone but repetitive idiomatic text typing takes users a lot of time.
This paper demonstrates a simple yet effective cloud based smart compose system to improve human-to-human conversation efficiency. 
Heuristics from different perspectives are designed to achieve the best trade-off between quality and latency.
From the modeling side, the decoder-only model exploited the previous turns of conversational history in a computation lightweight manner. 
Besides, a novel phrase tokenizer is proposed to reduce latency without losing the composing quality further. 
Additionally, the caching mechanism is applied to the serving framework. 
The demo video of the system is available at https://youtu.be/U1KXkaqr60g.
We open-sourced our phrase tokenizer in https://github.com/tensorflow/text.

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An Efficient Conversational Smart Compose System

We present KWJA, a high-performance unified Japanese text analyzer based on foundation models.
KWJA supports a wide range of tasks, including typo correction, word segmentation, word normalization, morphological analysis, named entity recognition, linguistic feature tagging, dependency parsing, PAS analysis, bridging reference resolution, coreference resolution, and discourse relation analysis, making it the most versatile among existing Japanese text analyzers.
KWJA solves these tasks in a multi-task manner but still achieves competitive or better performance compared to existing analyzers specialized for each task.
KWJA is publicly available under the MIT license at https://github.com/ku-nlp/kwja.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/qQ87ZDnDYN6cfmCQWHFaok/embed/polls/c676b4bb-ccd1-4e02-baf8-9bdeff179c50" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

KWJA: A Unified Japanese Analyzer Based on Foundation Models

An open-source DeepPavlov Dream Platform is specifically tailored for development of complex dialog systems like Generative AI Assistants. The stack prioritizes efficiency, modularity, scalability, and extensibility with the goal to make it easier to develop complex dialog systems from scratch. It supports modular approach to implementation of conversational agents enabling their development through the choice of NLP components and conversational skills from a rich library organized into the distributions of ready-for-use multi-skill AI assistant systems. In DeepPavlov Dream, multi-skill Generative AI Assistant consists of NLP components that extract features from user utterances, conversational skills that generate or retrieve a response, skill and response selectors that facilitate choice of relevant skills and the best response, as well as a conversational orchestrator that enables creation of multi-skill Generative AI Assistants scalable up to industrial grade AI assistants. The platform allows to integrate large language models into dialog pipeline, customize with prompt engineering, handle multiple prompts during the same dialog session and create simple multimodal assistants.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/qQ87ZDnDYN6cfmCQWHFaok/embed/polls/c6c8c00c-0795-4677-b219-271531a70968" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

DeepPavlov Dream: Platform for Building Generative AI Assistants

We present FRMT, a new dataset and evaluation benchmark for Few-shot Region-aware Machine Translation, a type of style-targeted translation. The dataset consists of professional translations from English into two regional variants each of Portuguese and Mandarin Chinese. Source documents are selected to enable detailed analysis of phenomena of interest, including lexically distinct terms and distractor terms. We explore automatic evaluation metrics for FRMT and validate their correlation with expert human evaluation across both region-matched and mismatched rating scenarios. Finally, we present a number of baseline models for this task, and offer guidelines for how researchers can train, evaluate, and compare their own models.Our dataset and evaluation code are publicly available: https://anonymized.

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Don't Parse, Choose Spans! Continuous and Discontinuous Constituency Parsing via Autoregressive Span Selection

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