Canada

Twitter and parliamentary speeches are very different communication channels, but many members of parliament (MPs) make use of both. Focusing on the topic of climate change, we undertake a comparative analysis of speeches and tweets uttered by MPs in Germany in a recent six-year period. By keyword/hashtag analyses and topic modeling, we find substantial differences along party lines, with left-leaning parties discussing climate change through a crisis frame, while liberal and conservative parties try to address climate change through the lens of climate-friendly technology and practices. Only the AfD denies the need to adopt climate
change mitigating measures, demeaning those concerned about a deteriorating climate as climate cult or fanatics. Our analysis reveals that climate change communication does not differ substantially between Twitter and parliamentary speeches, but across the political spectrum.

ACL 2023

Communicating Climate Change: A Comparison Between Tweets and Speeches by German Members of Parliament

climate discourse

parliamentary speech

twitter

topic modeling

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.

Recent years have seen a proliferation of aggressive social media posts, often wreaking even real-world consequences for victims. Aggressive behaviour on social media is especially evident during important sociopolitical events such as elections, communal incidents, and public protests. In this paper, we introduce a dataset in English to model political aggression. The dataset comprises public tweets collated across the time-frames of two of the most recent Indian general elections. We manually annotate this data for the task of aggression detection and analyze this data for aggressive behaviour. To benchmark the efficacy of our dataset, we perform experiments by fine-tuning pre-trained language models and comparing the results with models trained on an existing but general domain dataset. Our models consistently outperform the models trained on existing data. Our best model achieves a macro F1-score of 66.66 on our dataset. We also train models on a combined version of both datasets, achieving best macro F1-score of 92.77, on our dataset. Additionally, we create subsets of code-mixed and non-code-mixed data from the combined dataset to observe variations in results due to the Hindi-English code-mixing phenomenon. We publicly release the anonymized data, code, and models for further research.

Modelling Political Aggression on Social Media Platforms

This presentation describes the system for the YNU-HPCC team in WASSA-2023 Shared Task 1: Empathy Detection and Emotion Classification. This task needs to predict the empathy, emotion, and personality of the empathic reactions. This system is mainly based on the Decoding-enhanced BERT with disentangled attention (DeBERTa) model with parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) and the Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach (RoBERTa). Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning in PEFT is used to reduce the training parameters of large language models. Moreover, back translation is introduced to augment the training dataset. This system achieved relatively good results on the competition’s official leaderboard.

YNU-HPCC at WASSA-2023 Shared Task 1: Large-scale Language Model with LoRA Fine-Tuning for Empathy Detection and Emotion Classification

We present a study on using the RoBERTa language model for emotion classification of essays as part of the 'Shared Task on Empathy Detection, Emotion Classification and Personality Detection in Interactions' organized as part of 'WASSA 2023' at 'ACL 2023'. Emotion classification is a challenging task in natural language processing, and imbalanced datasets further exacerbate this challenge. In this study, we explore the use of various data balancing techniques in combination with RoBERTa to improve the classification performance. We evaluate the performance of our approach (denoted by adityapatkar on Codalab) on a benchmark multi-label dataset of essays annotated with eight emotion categories, provided by the Shared Task organizers. Our results show that the proposed approach achieves the best macro F1 score in the competition's training and evaluation phase. Our study provides insights into the potential of RoBERTa for handling imbalanced data in emotion classification. The results can have implications for the natural language processing tasks related to emotion classification.

AdityaPatkar at WASSA 2023 Empathy, Emotion, and Personality Shared Task: RoBERTa-Based Emotion Classification of Essays, Improving Performance on Imbalanced Data

The WASSA 2023 shared task on predicting empathy, emotion and other personality traits consists of essays, conversations and articles in textual form and participants' demographic information in numerical form. To address the tasks, our contributions include (1) converting numerical information into meaningful text information using appropriate templates, (2) summarising lengthy articles, and (3) augmenting training data by paraphrasing. To achieve these contributions, we leveraged two separate T5-based pre-trained transformers. We then fine-tuned pre-trained BERT, DistilBERT and ALBERT for predicting empathy and personality traits. We used the Optuna hyperparameter optimisation framework to fine-tune learning rates, batch sizes and weight initialisation. Our proposed system achieved its highest performance – a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.750 – on the conversation-level empathy prediction task. The system implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/hasan-rakibul/WASSA23-empathy-emotion.

Curtin OCAI at WASSA 2023 Empathy, Emotion and Personality Shared Task: Demographic-Aware Prediction Using Multiple Transformers

In this paper, we present Team Hawk’s participation in Track 1 of the WASSA 2023 shared task. The objective of the task is to understand the empathy that emerges between individuals during their conversations. In our study, we developed a multi-tasking framework that is capable of automatically assessing empathy, intensity of emotion, and polarity of emotion within participants’ conversations. Our proposed core model extends the transformer architecture, utilizing two separate RoBERTabased encoders to encode both the articles and conversations. Subsequently, a sequence of self-attention, position-wise feed-forward, and dense layers are employed to predict the regression scores for the three sub-tasks: empathy, intensity of emotion, and polarity of emotion. Our best model achieved average Pearson’s correlation of 0.7710 (Empathy: 0.7843, Emotion Polarity: 0.7917, Emotion Intensity: 0.7381) on the released development set and 0.7250 (Empathy: 0.8090, Emotion Polarity: 0.7010, Emotion Intensity: 0.6650) on the released test set. These results earned us the 3rd position in the test set evaluation phase of Track 1.

Team_Hawk at WASSA 2023 Empathy, Emotion, and Personality Shared Task: Multi-tasking Multi-encoder based transformers for Empathy and Emotion Prediction in Conversations

This paper describes our proposed system design for the WASSA 2023 shared task 1. We propose a unified architecture of ensemble neural networks to integrate the original RoBERTa transformer with two sentiment-enhanced RoBERTa-Twitter and EmoBERTa models. For Track 1 at the speech-turn level, our best submission achieved an average Pearson correlation score of 0.7236, ranking fourth for empathy, emotion polarity and emotion intensity prediction. For Track 2 at the essay-level, our best submission obtained an average Pearson correlation score of 0.4178 for predicting empathy and distress scores, ranked first among all nine submissions.

NCUEE-NLP at WASSA 2023 Shared Task 1: Empathy and Emotion Prediction Using Sentiment-Enhanced RoBERTa Transformers

This research contributes to the task of predicting empathy and personality traits within dialogue, an important aspect of natural language processing, as part of our experimental work for the WASSA 2023 Empathy and Emotion Shared Task. For predicting empathy, emotion polarity, and emotion intensity on turns within a dialogue, we employ adapters trained on social media interactions labeled with empathy ratings in a stacked composition with the target task adapters. Furthermore, we embed demographic information to predict Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) subscales and Big Five Personality Traits utilizing BERT-based models. The results from our study provide valuable insights, contributing to advancements in understanding human behavior and interaction through text. Our team ranked 2nd on the personality and empathy prediction tasks, 4th on the interpersonal reactivity index, and 6th on the conversational task.

Domain Transfer for Empathy, Distress, and Personality Prediction

In this paper, we highlight our approach for the "WASSA 2023 Empathy and Emotion Shared Task". We present our approach for track 3 of the shared task which aims to identify emotions from text. Each sample in the dataset has one or more labels making it a multi-label classification task. We compared multiple transformer-based models by fine-tuning them for multi-label classification. Oversampling was used to overcome the class imbalance in the dataset. Ensembling techniques were used to improve the performance of the system. We obtained a macro F1-score of 0.5649 using XLNet on the test dataset in the official phase and secured rank 6 on the official leaderboard. During the post-competition phase, a threshold-based voting mechanism was performed on three models (Longformer, BERT, BigBird) that yielded the highest overall macro F1-score of 0.6605.

Converge at WASSA 2023 Empathy, Emotion and Personality Shared Task: A Transformer-based Approach for Multi-Label Emotion Classification

This paper presents our approach for the WASSA 2023 Empathy, Emotion and Personality Shared Task. Empathy and distress are human feelings that are implicitly expressed in natural discourses. Empathy and distress detection are crucial challenges in Natural Language Processing that can aid our understanding of conversations. The provided dataset consists of several long-text examples in the English language, with each example associated with a numeric score for empathy and distress. We experiment with several BERT-based models as a part of our approach. We also try various ensemble methods. Our final submission has a Pearson's r score of 0.346, placing us third in the empathy and distress detection subtask.

PICT-CLRL at WASSA 2023 Empathy, Emotion and Personality Shared Task: Empathy and Distress Detection using Ensembles of Transformer Models

This paper describes the approach that we used to take part in the multi-label multi- class emotion classification as Track 3 of the WASSA 2023 Empathy, Emotion and Personality Shared Task at ACL 2023. The overall goal of this track is to build models that can predict 8 classes (7 emotions + neutral) based on short English essays written in response to news article that talked about events perceived as harmful to people. We used OpenAI generative pretrained transformers with full-scale APIs for the emotion prediction task by fine-tuning a GPT-3 model and doing prompt engineering for zero-shot / few-shot learning with ChatGPT and GPT-4 models based on multiple experiments on the dev set. The most efficient method was fine-tuning a GPT-3 model which allowed us to beat our baseline character-based XGBoost Classifier and rank 2nd among all other participants by achieving a macro F1 score of 0.65 and a micro F1 score of 0.7 on the final blind test set.


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Communicating Climate Change: A Comparison Between Tweets and Speeches by German Members of Parliament

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