Indonesia

The scarcity of comprehensive, high-quality Question-Answering (QA) datasets in low-resource languages has greatly limited the progress of research on QA for these languages. This has inspired research on Question-Answer Generation (QAG) which seeks to synthetically generate QA pairs and minimize the human effort required to compile labeled datasets. In this paper, we present the first QAG pipeline for the Bengali language, which consists of an answer span extraction model, a question generation model, and roundtrip consistency filtering to discard inconsistent QA pairs. To train our QAG pipeline, we translate SQuAD1.1 and SQuAD2.0 using the state-of-the-art NLLB machine translation model and accurately mark the answer spans using a novel embedding-based answer alignment algorithm to construct two Bengali QA datasets that we show are superior to the only two existing machine-translated datasets in terms of quality and quantity. We use our QAG pipeline to generate more than 170,000 QA pairs to build BanglaQA, a synthetic QA dataset from 16,000 Bengali news articles spanning 5 different news categories. We demonstrate the quality of BanglaQA by human evaluation on a variety of metrics. The best-performing model among several baselines on our dataset achieves an F1 score of 86.14 falling behind human performance of 95.72 F1. Our codebase and curated datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/shihabshahriar16/BengaliQAG.git.

IJCNLP-AACL 2023

Question Answer Generation in Bengali: Mitigating the scarcity of QA datasets in a low-resource language

technical paper

### Welcome to IJCNLP-AACL 2023!
I am honored and happy to welcome you to IJCNLP-AACL 2023! The conference hosts both the 13th
International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP) and the 3rd Conference of
the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL). 
The joint conferences of IJCNLP and AACL have been organized by alternating leadership in the
Asia-Pacific region, in odd years by Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP) and
in even years by AACL. The conference is organized by AFNLP this year. 

Considering the current situation that we are not yet fully over the coronavirus pandemic, the
conference is offered in a hybrid mode, off-line in Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia, and on-line with the help
of Underline, during November 1-4, 2023. For those attending off-line, I hope that you will find time to
explore the exciting local area, which remains quite warm and pleasant at this time of the year. For
those attending on-line, I hope that the attendance is not much hampered, sometimes even enhanced
and comfortable, though the on-line arrangements have been made without ample time. 

Message from Jong C. Park, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) 
IJCNLP-AACL 2023 General Chair 
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The 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Causality expresses the relation between two arguments, one of which represents the cause and the other the effect (or consequence). Causal relations are fundamental to human decision making and reasoning, and extracting them from natural language texts is crucial for building effective natural language understanding models. However, the scarcity of annotated corpora for causal relations poses a challenge in the development of such tools. Thus, we created Resource for Extracting Cause, Effect, and Signal Spans (RECESS), a comprehensive corpus annotated for causality at different levels, including Cause, Effect, and Signal spans. The corpus contains 3,767 sentences, of which, 1,982 are causal sentences that contain a total of 2,754 causal relations. We report baseline experiments on two natural language tasks (Causal Sentence Classification, and Cause-Effect-Signal Span Detection), and establish initial benchmarks for future work. We conduct an in-depth analysis of the corpus and the properties of causal relations in text. RECESS is a valuable resource for developing and evaluating causal relation extraction models, benefiting researchers working on topics from information retrieval to natural language understanding and inference.

RECESS: Resource for Extracting Cause, Effect, and Signal Spans

The research for detecting offensive language on online platforms has much advanced. However, the majority of these studies have primarily focused on English. Given the unique characteristics of offensive language, where social and cultural contexts significantly influence content understanding, language-specific datasets are essential. Acquiring comprehensive datasets in Korean, a less-resourced language, has mostly relied on human annotations, suffering from inherent limitations in terms of labor intensity and potential annotator bias. Automatic generation of datasets using generative methods offers an alternative approach to address these limitations, yet faces challenges in capturing linguistic and cultural diversities while maintaining native-level fluency. To address these challenges, we introduce a prompt design methodology, Korean Offensive language Machine Generation (K-OMG), using large language models. By manipulating three prompt factors, we find an effective prompt design to generate culturally aligned offensive language with fluent expressions. Experimental results demonstrate the high quality and utility of our automatically generated dataset. Our detailed analysis shows that the proposed approach achieves exceptional fluency in generating texts while effectively incorporating social and cultural diversities.

Generation of Korean Offensive Language by Leveraging Large Language Models via Prompt Design

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Question Answer Generation in Bengali: Mitigating the scarcity of QA datasets in a low-resource language

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