Canada

This presentation describes the system that we used to participate in SemEval 2023 task 10. Our system is an ensemble of different variants of fine-tuned DeBERTa models that employs a $k$-fold cross-validation. We have participated in the three tasks A, B and C. Our model ranked $2^{nd}$ position in tasks A, $7^{th}$ in task B and $4^{th}$ in task C

ACL 2023

{FiRC at SemEval-2023 Task 10: Fine-grained Classification of Online Sexism Content Using DeBERTa

cross-validation

deberta

ensemble models

hate speech

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. 
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ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

workshop paper

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
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. 
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)**

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.

This paper describes our system designed for SemEval-2023 Task 12: Sentiment analysis for African languages. The challenge faced by this task is the scarcity of labeled data and linguistic resources in low-resource settings. To alleviate these, we propose a generalized multilingual system SACL-XLMR for sentiment analysis on low-resource languages. Specifically, we design a lexicon-based multilingual BERT to facilitate language adaptation and sentimentaware representation learning. Besides, we apply a supervised adversarial contrastive learning technique to learn sentiment-spread structured representations and enhance model generalization. Our system achieved competitive results, largely outperforming baselines on both multilingual and zero-shot sentiment classification subtasks. Notably, the system obtained the 1st rank on the zero-shot classification subtask in the official ranking. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our system.

UCAS-IIE-NLP at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Enhancing Generalization of Multilingual BERT for Low-resource Sentiment Analysis

With the increasing number of clinical trial reports generated every day, it is becoming hard to keep up with novel discoveries that inform evidence-based healthcare recommendations. To help automate this process and assist medical experts, NLP solutions are being developed. This motivated the SemEval-2023 Task 7, where the goal was to develop an NLP system for two tasks: evidence retrieval and natural language inference from clinical trial data. In this paper, we describe our two developed systems. The first one is a pipeline system that models the two tasks separately, while the second one is a joint system that learns the two tasks simultaneously with a shared representation and a multi-task learning approach. The final system combines their outputs in an ensemble system. We formalize the models, present their characteristics and challenges, and provide an analysis of achieved results. Our system ranked 3rd out of 40 participants with a final submission.

Sebis at SemEval-2023 Task 7: A Joint System for Natural Language Inference and Evidence Retrieval from Clinical Trial Reports

In this paper, we introduce our submission in the task of visual word sense disambiguation (V-WSD). Our proposed solution operates by deriving quasi-symbolic semantic categories from the hidden representations of multi-modal text-image encoders. Our results are mixed, as we manage to achieve a substantial boost
in performance when evaluating on a validation set, however, we experienced detrimental effects during evaluation on the actual test set. Our positive results on the validation set confirms the validity of the quasi-symbolic features, whereas our results on the test set revealed that the proposed technique was not able to cope with the sufficiently different distribution of the test data.

SzegedAI at SemEval-2023 Task 1: Applying Quasi-Symbolic Representations in Visual Word Sense Disambiguation

We describe the systems of the University of Alberta team for the SemEval-2023 Visual Word Sense Disambiguation (V-WSD) Task. We present a novel algorithm that leverages glosses retrieved from BabelNet, in combination with text and image encoders. Furthermore, we compare language-specific encoders against the application of English encoders to translated texts. As the contexts given in the task datasets are extremely short, we also experiment with augmenting these contexts with descriptions generated by a language model. This yields substantial improvements in accuracy. We describe and evaluate additional V-WSD methods which use image generation and text-conditioned image segmentation. Overall, the results of our official submission rank us 18 out of 56 teams. Some of our unofficial results are even better than the official ones.

UAlberta at SemEval-2023 Task 1: Context Augmentation and Translation for Multilingual Visual Word Sense Disambiguation

We present the system proposed by the MilaNLP team for the Explainable Detection of Online Sexism (EDOS) shared task.
We propose an ensemble modeling approach to combine different classifiers trained with domain adaptation objectives and standard fine-tuning.
Our results show that the ensemble is more robust than individual models and that regularized models generate more ``conservative'' predictions, mitigating the effects of lexical overfitting.
However, our error analysis also finds that many of the misclassified instances are debatable, raising questions about the objective annotatability of hate speech data.

MilaNLP at SemEval-2023 Task 10: Ensembling Domain-Adapted and Regularized Pretrained Language Models for Robust Sexism Detection

This paper describes the system we used to participate in the shared task (Kiesel et al., 2023),
as well as additional experiments beyond the
scope of the shared task, but using its data. Our
primary goal is to compare the effectiveness of
transformers model compared to low-resource
dictionaries. Secondly, we compare the difference in performance of a learned dictionary
and of a dictionary designed by experts in the
field of values. Our findings surprisingly show
that transformers perform on par with a dictionary containing less than 1k words, when
evaluated with 19 fine-grained categories, and
only outperform a dictionary-based approach
in a coarse setting with 10 categories. Interestingly, the expert dictionary has a precision
on par with the learned one, while its recall is
clearly lower, potentially an indication of overfitting of topics to values in the shared task’s
dataset. Our findings should be of interest to
both the NLP and Value scientific communities
on the use of automated approaches for value
classification.


TeamEC at SemEval-2023 Task 4: Transformers vs. Low-Resource Dictionaries, Expert Dictionary vs. Learned Dictionary

This paper presents the submissions of the DH- FBK team for the three tasks of Task 10 at SemEval 2023. The Explainable Detection of Online Sexism (EDOS) task aims at detecting sexism in English text in an accurate and ex- plainable way, thanks to a fine-grained annota- tion that follows a three-level schema: sexist or not (Task A), category of sexism (Task B) and vector of sexism (Task C) exhibited. We use a multi-task learning approach in which models share representations from all three tasks, al- lowing for knowledge to be shared across them. Notably, with our approach a single model can solve all three tasks. In addition, motivated by the subjective nature of the task, we incorpo- rate inter-annotator agreement information in our multi-task architecture. Although disaggre- gated annotations are not available, we artifi- cially estimate them using a 5-classifier ensem- ble, and show that ensemble agreement can be a good approximation of crowd agreement. Our approach achieves competitive results, ranking 32nd out of 84, 24th out of 69 and 11th out of 63 for Tasks A, B and C respectively. We finally show that low inter-annotator agreement levels are associated with more challenging examples for models, making agreement information use- ful for this kind of task.

DH-FBK at SemEval-2023 Task 10: Multi-Task Learning with Classifier Ensemble Agreement for Sexism Detection

This presentation describes our approach for SemEval-2023 Task 3: Detecting the category, the framing, and the persuasion techniques in online news in a multilingual setup. For Subtask 1 (News Genre), we propose an ensemble of fully trained and adapter mBERT models which was ranked joint-first for German, and had the highest mean rank of multi-language teams. For Subtask 2 (Framing), we achieved first place in 3 languages, and the best average rank across all the languages, by using two separate ensembles: a monolingual RoBERTa-MUPPETlarge and an ensemble of XLM-RoBERTaLARGE with adapters and task adaptive pretraining. For Subtask 3 (Persuasion Techniques), we trained a monolingual RoBERTa-Base model for English and a multilingual mBERT model for the remaining languages, which achieved top 10 for all languages, including 2nd for English. For each subtask, we compared monolingual and multilingual approaches, and considered class imbalance techniques

SheffieldVeraAI at SemEval-2023 Task 3: Mono and Multilingual Approaches for News Genre, Topic and Persuasion Technique Classification

The MultiCoNER \RNum{2} shared task aims to tackle multilingual named entity recognition (NER) in fine-grained and noisy scenarios, and it inherits the semantic ambiguity and low-context setting of the MultiCoNER \RNum{1} task. To cope with these problems, the previous top systems in the MultiCoNER \RNum{1} either incorporate the knowledge bases or gazetteers. However, they still suffer from insufficient knowledge, limited context length, single retrieval strategy. In this paper, our team \textbf{DAMO-NLP} proposes a unified retrieval-augmented system (U-RaNER) for fine-grained multilingual NER. We perform error analysis on the previous top systems and reveal that their performance bottleneck lies in insufficient knowledge. Also, we discover that the limited context length causes the retrieval knowledge to be invisible to the model. To enhance the retrieval context, we incorporate the entity-centric Wikidata knowledge base, while utilizing the infusion approach to broaden the contextual scope of the model. Also, we explore various search strategies and refine the quality of retrieval knowledge. Our system\footnote{We will release the dataset, code, and scripts of our system at {\small \url{https://github.com/modelscope/AdaSeq/tree/master/examples/U-RaNER}}.} wins 9 out of 13 tracks in the MultiCoNER \RNum{2} shared task. 
Additionally, we compared our system with ChatGPT, one of the large language models which have unlocked strong capabilities on many tasks. The results show that there is still much room for improvement for ChatGPT on the extraction task.

DAMO-NLP at SemEval-2023 Task 2: A Unified Retrieval-augmented System for Multilingual Named Entity Recognition

nlp datasets annotated with human judgments are rife with disagreements between the judges. This is especially true for tasks depending on subjective judgments such as sentiment analysis or offensive language detection. Particularly in these latter cases, the nlp community has come to realize that the approach of ‘reconcil- ing’ these different subjective interpretations is inappropriate. Many nlp researchers have therefore concluded that rather than eliminat- ing disagreements from annotated corpora, we should preserve them–indeed, some argue that corpora should aim to preserve all annotator judgments. But this approach to corpus cre- ation for nlp has not yet been widely accepted. The objective of the LeWiDi series of shared tasks is to promote this approach to developing nlp models by providing a unified framework for training and evaluating with such datasets. We report on the second LeWiDi shared task, which differs from the first edition in three crucial respects: (i) it focuses entirely on nlp, instead of both nlp and computer vision tasks in its first edition; (ii) it focuses on subjective tasks, instead of covering different types of disagreements–as training with aggregated la- bels for subjective nlp tasks is a particularly obvious misrepresentation of the data; and (iii) for the evaluation, we concentrate on soft ap- proaches to evaluation. This second edition of LeWiDi attracted a wide array of participants resulting in 13 shared task submission papers.

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UCAS-IIE-NLP at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Enhancing Generalization of Multilingual BERT for Low-resource Sentiment Analysis

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