Indonesia

Despite decades of research
on authorship attribution (AA) 
and authorship verification (AV),
inconsistent dataset splits/filtering 
and mismatched evaluation methods 
make it difficult to assess the state of the art.
In this paper, 
we present a survey of the fields, 
resolve points of confusion,
introduce Valla that 
standardizes and benchmarks AA/AV datasets and metrics, 
provide a large-scale empirical evaluation,
and provide apples-to-apples comparisons 
between existing methods.
We evaluate eight promising methods on fifteen datasets
(including distribution shifted challenge sets) 
and introduce a new dataset 
based on texts archived by Project Gutenberg. 
Surprisingly, we find that a traditional \ngram-based model 
performs best on 5 (of 7) AA tasks,
achieving an average macro-accuracy of 76.50%
(compared to 66.71% for a BERT-based model).
However, on the two AA datasets with the greatest number of words per author, 
as well as on the AV datasets, 
BERT-based models perform best. 
While AV methods are easily applied to AA,
they are seldom included as baselines in AA papers. 
We show that through the application of hard-negative mining, 
AV methods are competitive alternatives to AA methods.
Valla and all experiment code can be found at
https://github.com/JacobTyo/Valla

IJCNLP-AACL 2023

Valla: Standardizing and Benchmarking Authorship Attribution and Verification Through Empirical Evaluation and Comparative Analysis

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 
###### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S2JSXa105xJxIkNBfhYmGH20Om6wARBx/view?usp=sharing)

In order to acces this event page, you need to register [here](http://www.ijcnlp-aacl2023.org/)

The 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Media bias detection requires comprehensive integration of information derived from multiple news sources. Sentence-level political bias detection in news is no exception, and has proven to be a challenging task that requires an understanding of bias in consideration of the context. Inspired by the fact that humans exhibit varying degrees of writing styles, resulting in a diverse range of statements with different local and global contexts, previous work in media bias detection has proposed augmentation techniques to exploit this fact. Despite their success, we observe that these techniques introduce noise by over-generalizing bias context boundaries, which hinders performance. To alleviate this issue, we propose techniques to more carefully search for context using a bias-sensitive, target-aware approach for data augmentation. Comprehensive experiments on the well-known BASIL dataset show that when combined with pre-trained models such as BERT, our augmentation techniques lead to state-of-the-art results. Our approach outperforms significantly, obtaining an F1-score of 58.15 over state-of-the-art bias detection task.

Target-Aware Contextual Political Bias Detection in News

Democratizing access to natural language processing (NLP) technology is crucial, especially for underrepresented and extremely low-resource languages. Previous research has focused on developing labeled and unlabeled corpora for these languages through online scraping and document translation. While these methods have proven effective and cost-efficient, we have identified limitations in the resulting corpora, including a lack of lexical diversity and cultural relevance to local communities. To address this gap, we conduct a case study on Indonesian local languages. We compare the effectiveness of online scraping, human translation, and paragraph writing by native speakers in constructing datasets. Our findings demonstrate that datasets generated through paragraph writing by native speakers exhibit superior quality in terms of lexical diversity and cultural content. In addition, we present the \datasetname{} benchmark, encompassing 12 underrepresented and extremely low-resource languages spoken by millions of individuals in Indonesia. Our empirical experiment results using existing multilingual large language models emphasize the need to extend these models to more underrepresented languages.

NusaWrites: Constructing High-Quality Corpora for Underrepresented and Extremely Low-Resource Languages

Persuasive meme identification is a crucial task in automatically categorizing memes based on their persuasive nature. Memes, being highly influential in online communication, have the ability to shape individuals' attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs, both positively and negatively. They can be utilized to promote positive actions, challenge social norms, and raise awareness, but they can also perpetuate harmful ideologies, spread misinformation, stereotype, and manipulate emotions. In this paper, we are addressing this challenge by empirically investigating three novel tasks: (i) Task 1: Persuasive meme detection (ii) Task 2: Identification of the effectiveness of persuasive memes, and (iii) Task 3: Identification of persuasion techniques used in persuasive memes. To this end, we make the very first attempt to release a high-quality, large-scale dataset, Persuasive_meme since there is no publicly available such dataset for Hindi-English code-mixed (Hinglish) domain. We further developed several baseline unimodal and multimodal models for these tasks. Empirical evaluations, including both qualitative and quantitative analysis, on the Persuasive_meme dataset highlight the significance of multimodality in addressing these tasks effectively. Additionally, also we discuss the limitations of the current models and emphasize the need for further research to overcome these challenges.

The Persuasive Memescape: Understanding Effectiveness and Societal Implications of Internet Memes

Conventional text style transfer approaches focus on sentence-level style transfer without considering contextual information, and the style is described with attributes (e.g., formality). When applying style transfer in conversations such as task-oriented dialogues, existing approaches suffer from these limitations as context can play an important role and the style attributes are often difficult to define in conversations. In this paper, we introduce conversation style transfer as a few-shot learning problem, where the model learns to perform style transfer by observing only a few example dialogues in the target style. We propose a novel in-context learning approach to solve the task with style-free dialogues as a pivot. Human evaluation shows that by incorporating multi-turn context, the model is able to match the target style while having better appropriateness and semantic correctness compared to utterance/sentence-level style transfer. Additionally, we show that conversation style transfer can also benefit downstream tasks. For example, in multi-domain intent classification tasks, the F1 scores improve after transferring the style of training data to match the style of the test data.

Conversation Style Transfer using Few-Shot Learning

Previous studies exploring the human-like capabilities of machine-learning models have primarily focused on pure language models. 
Limited attention has been given to investigating whether models exhibit human-like behavior when performing tasks that require the integration of visual and language information.
In this study, we investigate the impact of tags of semantic, phonological, and bilingual features on the visual question answering task performance of an unsupervised model. 
Our findings reveal its similarities with the influence of distractors in the picture-naming task (known as the picture-word-interference paradigm) observed in human experiments: 

1) Semantically-related tags have a more negative effect on task performance compared to unrelated tags, indicating a more robust competition between visual and tag information which are semantically closer to each other when generating an answer. 
2) Even presenting a partial section (wordpiece) of the originally detected tag significantly improves task performance, with the portion that plays a lesser role in determining the overall meaning of the original tag leading to a more pronounced improvement. 
3) Tags in two languages that refer to the same meaning exhibit a symmetrical-like effect on performance in balanced bilingual models.

Datasets and code of this project are released at https://github.com/NLPbelllabs/PWI.

Human-Like Distractor Response in Vision-Language Model

Most work on verbalising Knowledge-Graphs (KG) has focused on high-resource languages such as English, Russian, Czech or Arabic. In this paper, we focus on KG-to-Text generation where the output text is in Breton, Irish or Welsh. To overcome the small size of the parallel training data, we combine the strengths of a multilingual language model with denoising fine-tuning on monolingual data and Soft Prompt fine-tuning on a small quantity of KG/text data. We furthermore structure the soft prompt into multiple sub-prompts designed to capture the similarities and differences between English, Knowledge graphs and the three target languages. Our experiments show that our approach outperforms strong baselines and that all sub-prompts contribute to performance.

Phylogeny-Inspired Soft Prompts For Data-to-Text Generation in Low-Resource Languages

Prior work has shown that the ordering in which concepts are shown to a commonsense generator plays an important role, affecting the quality of the generated sentence. However, it remains a challenge to determine the optimal ordering of a given set of concepts such that a natural sentence covering all the concepts could be generated from a pretrained generator. To understand the relationship between the ordering of the input concepts and the quality of the generated sentences, we conduct a systematic study considering multiple language models (LMs) and concept ordering strategies. We find that BART-large model consistently outperforms all other LMs considered in this study when fine-tuned using the ordering of concepts as they appear in CommonGen training data as measured using multiple evaluation metrics. Moreover, the larger GPT3-based large language models (LLMs) variants do not necessarily outperform much smaller LMs on this task, even when fine-tuned on task-specific training data. Interestingly, human annotators significantly reorder input concept sets when manually writing sentences covering those concepts, and this ordering provides the best sentence generations independently of the LM used for the generation, outperforming a probabilistic concept ordering baseline.

Learning to Predict Concept Ordering for Common Sense Generation

The escalating volume and frequency of social media complaints necessitate robust automated complaint analysis techniques. Much of the existing body of research in this area has been devoted to two primary aspects: identifying complaint-specific content amidst other non-complaint communications, and predicting the severity of a complaint, which involves classifying complaints into different severity levels based on the anticipated resolution from the complainant's perspective. These automated analysis tools equip companies with the means to effectively manage complaints and generate suitable responses. In our study, we present a unified generative approach for complaint detection, transforming the multitask learning problem into a text-to-text generation task. As part of our training strategy, we adopt the Seq2Path training paradigm that conceptualizes the outcome as a tree structure as opposed to a traditional sequence. This innovative approach tackles the drawbacks of conventional sequences, such as the lack of order among the outputs, yielding a more coherent and structured output. Our model's effectiveness is assessed against the benchmark \textit{Complaints} dataset, highlighting its superior performance across diverse evaluation metrics when compared with state-of-the-art models and other baselines.

Reimagining Complaint Analysis: Adopting Seq2Path for a Generative Text-to-Text Framework

Having heard "a pimwit", English-speakers assume that "the pimwit" is also possible. This type of productivity is attributed to syntactic categories such as NOUN and DETERMINER, but the key question is how do humans become endowed with these categories in the first place. We propose a novel approach that combines corpus analysis with computational modeling to analyze the productivity of DETERMINER+NOUN constructions in child-produced utterances. Our experiments on two corpora of child-adult interactions using two different methods of quantifying linguistic productivity show that children do not display productivity at early stages. Using a model trained on child-directed utterances, we simulate children's developmental trajectory with great precision, suggesting that the emergence of productivity in human language can be explained without the need to postulate a priori access to syntactic categories.

Linguistic Productivity: the Case of Determiners in English

Volatility, a crucial statistical measure in the financial market, serves as an indicator of financial instrument risk. Accurate volatility capture aids in predicting stock movements and is valuable in derivative trading, such as options trading. While recent research focuses on volatility forecasting using earnings call transcriptions, most approaches rely on end-to-end models that directly process textual or vocal data. However, limited efforts have been made to simulate the reading and comprehension processes of financial professionals, thereby enhancing the capabilities of language models. To address this gap, we propose a general numeral attachment dataset designed to train language models to understand earnings calls with the expertise of professionals. Additionally, we introduce a pre-training process that improves the semantic understanding of earnings calls. Experimental results demonstrate that our pre-trained language model enhances the accuracy of 3-day volatility forecasting.

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Valla: Standardizing and Benchmarking Authorship Attribution and Verification Through Empirical Evaluation and Comparative Analysis

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