Malta

Nuanced dialects are a linguistic variant that poses several challenges for NLP models and techniques. One of the main challenges is the limited amount of datasets to enable extensive research and experimentation. We propose an approach for efficiently collecting nuanced dialectal datasets that are not only of high quality but are versatile enough to be multipurpose as well. To test our approach, we collect the KIND corpus, which is a collection of fine-grained Arabic dialect data. The data is short texts, and unlike many nuanced dialectal datasets, it is curated manually through social collaboration efforts as opposed to being crawled from social media. The collaborative approach is incentivized through educational gamification and competitions for which the community itself benefits from the open-source dataset. Our approach aims to achieve: (1) coverage of dialects from under-represented groups and fine-grained dialectal varieties, (2) provide aligned parallel corpora for translation between Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and multiple dialects to enable translation and comparison studies, (3) promote innovative approaches for nuanced dialect data collection. We explain the steps for the competition as well as the resulting datasets and the competing data collection systems. The KIND dataset is shared with the research community.

EACL 2024

The KIND Dataset: A Social Collaboration Approach for Nuanced Dialect Data Collection

dialects

data collection

low-resource languages

poster

Welcome to the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language. 
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As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

Language models (LMs) have become pivotal in the realm of technological advancements. While their capabilities are vast and transformative, they often include societal biases encoded in the human-produced datasets used for their training. This research delves into the inherent biases present in masked language models (MLMs), with a specific focus on gender biases. This study evaluated six prominent models: BERT, RoBERTa, DistilBERT, BERT-multilingual, XLM-RoBERTa, and DistilBERT-multilingual. The methodology employed a novel dataset, bifurcated into two subsets: one containing prompts that encouraged models to generate subject pronouns in English, and the other requiring models to return the probabilities of verbs, adverbs, and adjectives linked to the prompts’ gender pronouns. The analysis reveals stereotypical gender alignment of all models, with multilingual variants showing comparatively reduced biases.

UnMASKed: Quantifying Gender Biases in Masked Language Models through Linguistically Informed Job Market Prompts

Grounding language models (LMs) to knowledge bases (KBs) helps to obtain rich and accurate facts. However, it remains challenging because of the enormous size, complex structure, and partial observability of KBs. One reason is that current benchmarks fail to reflect robustness challenges and fairly evaluate models. This paper analyzes whether these robustness challenges arise from distribution shifts, including environmental, linguistic, and modal aspects. This affects the ability of LMs to cope with unseen schema, adapt to language variations, and perform few-shot learning. Thus, the paper proposes extensive evaluation protocols and conducts experiments to demonstrate that, despite utilizing our proposed data augmentation method, both advanced small and large language models exhibit poor robustness in these aspects. We conclude that current LMs are too fragile to navigate in complex environments due to distribution shifts. This underscores the need for future research focusing on data collection, evaluation protocols, and learning paradigms.

Distribution Shifts Are Bottlenecks: Extensive Evaluation for Grounding Language Models to Knowledge Bases

Text classification systems have been proven vulnerable to adversarial text examples, modified versions of the original text examples that are often unnoticed by human eyes, yet can force text classification models to alter their classification. Often, research works quantifying the impact of adversarial text attacks have been applied only to models trained in English. In this paper, we introduce the first word-level study of adversarial attacks in Arabic. Specifically, we use a synonym (word-level) attack using a Masked Language Modeling (MLM) task with a BERT model in a black-box setting to assess the robustness of the state-of-the-art text classification models to adversarial attacks in Arabic. To evaluate the grammatical and semantic similarities of the newly produced adversarial examples using our synonym BERT-based attack, we invite four human evaluators to assess and compare the produced adversarial examples with their original examples. We also study the transferability of these newly produced Arabic adversarial examples to various models and investigate the effectiveness of defense mechanisms against these adversarial examples on the BERT models. We find that fine-tuned BERT models were more susceptible to our synonym attacks than the other Deep Neural Networks (DNN) models like WordCNN and WordLSTM we trained. We also find that fine-tuned BERT models were more susceptible to transferred attacks. We, lastly, find that fine-tuned BERT models successfully regain at least 2% in accuracy after applying adversarial training as an initial defense mechanism.

Arabic Synonym BERT-based Adversarial Examples for Text Classification

Multimodal hateful content detection is a challenging task that requires complex reasoning across visual and textual modalities. Therefore, creating a meaningful multimodal representation that effectively captures the interplay between visual and textual features through intermediate fusion is critical. Conventional fusion techniques are unable to attend to the modality-specific features effectively. Moreover, most studies exclusively concentrated on English and overlooked other low-resource languages. This paper proposes a context-aware attention framework for multimodal hateful content detection and assesses it for both English and non-English languages. The proposed approach incorporates an attention layer to meaningfully align the visual and textual features. This alignment enables selective focus on modality-specific features before fusing them. We evaluate the proposed approach on two benchmark hateful meme datasets, viz. MUTE (Bengali code-mixed) and MultiOFF (English). Evaluation results demonstrate our proposed approach's effectiveness with F1-scores of 69.7% and 70.3% for the MUTE and MultiOFF datasets. The scores show approximately 2.5% and 3.2% performance improvement over the state-of-the-art systems on these datasets.

Align before Attend: Aligning Visual and Textual Features for Multimodal Hateful Content Detection

We explore computational methods for perceived agency attribution in natural language data. We consider 'agency' as the freedom and capacity to act, and the corresponding Natural Language Processing (NLP) task involves automatically detecting attributions of agency to entities in text. Our theoretical framework draws on semantic frame analysis, role labelling and related techniques. In initial experiments, we focus on the perceived agency of AI systems. To achieve this, we analyse a dataset of English-language news coverage of AI-related topics, published within one year surrounding the release of the Large Language Model-based service ChatGPT, a milestone in the general public's awareness of AI. Building on this, we propose a schema to annotate a dataset for agency attribution and formulate additional research questions to answer by applying NLP models.

Thesis Proposal: Detecting Agency Attribution

Depression has been extensively researched in the NLP field, focusing on individuals' negative emotions. However, people with depression also experience happiness, but this has not been extensively studied. In this work, we conduct a large-scale study of happy moments from social media texts of people with and without depression. We develop an extensive deep learning-based framework to extract happy moments from text in English, and annotate them with topic information, gender labels, and agency and sociality measures. We analyze over 400,000 happy moments and show significant differences in topics, agency, and sociality of depressed and not-depressed users, varying by gender. Our research can help inform psychology interventions aimed at fostering longer-lasting feelings of happiness and represents a promising area of collaboration between computational linguistics and psychology.

Social Media Portrayals of Happy Moments Among Depressed Individuals

Robustness in Natural Language Processing continues to be a pertinent issue, where state of the art models under-perform under naturally shifted distributions. In the context of Question Answering, work on domain adaptation methods continues to be a growing body of research. However, very little attention has been given to the notion of domain generalization under natural distribution shifts, where the target domain is unknown. With drastic improvements in the quality of and access to generative models, we answer the question: How do generated datasets influence the performance of QA models under natural distribution shifts? We perform experiments on 4 different datasets under varying amounts of distribution shift, and analyze how "in-the-wild" generation can help achieve domain generalization. We take a two-step generation approach, generating both contexts and QA pairs to augment existing datasets. Through our experiments, we demonstrate how augmenting reading comprehension datasets with generated data leads to better robustness towards natural distribution shifts.

Generative Data Augmentation using LLMs improves Distributional Robustness in Question Answering

Empathy is crucial in numerous social interactions, including human-robot, patient-doctor, teacher-student, and customer-call centre conversations. Despite its importance, empathy detection in videos continues to be a challenging task because of the subjective nature of empathy and often remains under-explored. Existing studies have relied on scripted or semi-scripted interactions in text-, audio-, or video-only settings that fail to capture the complexities and nuances of real-life interactions. This PhD research aims to fill these gaps by developing a multimodal language model (MMLM) that detects empathy in audiovisual data. In addition to leveraging existing datasets, the proposed study involves collecting real-life interaction video and audio. This study will leverage optimisation techniques like neural architecture search to deliver an optimised small-scale MMLM. Successful implementation of this project has significant implications in enhancing the quality of social interactions as it enables real-time measurement of empathy and thus provides potential avenues for training for better empathy in interactions.

Thesis Proposal: Detecting Empathy Using Multimodal Language Model

Reasoning over Commonsense Knowledge Bases (CSKB), i.e. CSKB reasoning, has been explored as a way to acquire new commonsense knowledge based on reference knowledge in the original CSKBs and external prior knowledge.
Despite the advancement of Large Language Models (LLM) and prompt engineering techniques in various reasoning tasks, they still struggle to deal with CSKB reasoning.
One of the problems is that it is hard for them to acquire explicit relational constraints in CSKBs from only in-context exemplars, due to a lack of symbolic reasoning capabilities ~\cite{bengio2021deeplearning}.
To this end, we proposed **ConstraintChecker**, a plugin over prompting techniques to provide and check explicit constraints.
When considering a new knowledge instance, ConstraintChecker employs a rule-based module to produce a list of constraints, then it uses a zero-shot learning module to check whether this knowledge instance satisfies all constraints.
The acquired constraint-checking result is then aggregated with the output of the main prompting technique to produce the final output.
Experimental results on CSKB Reasoning benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by bringing consistent improvements over all prompting methods.

ConstraintChecker: A Plugin for Large Language Models to Reason on Commonsense Knowledge Bases

The existing work on vision and language navigation mainly relies on navigation-related losses to establish the connection between vision and language modalities, neglecting aspects of helping the navigation agent build a deep understanding of the visual environment.
In our work, we provide indirect supervision to the navigation agent through a hint generator that provides detailed visual descriptions.
The hint generator assists the navigation agent in developing a global understanding of the visual environment. It directs the agent's attention toward related navigation details, including the relevant sub-instruction, potential challenges in recognition and ambiguities in grounding, and the targeted viewpoint description. 
To train the hint generator, we construct a synthetic dataset based on landmarks in the instructions and visible and distinctive objects in the visual environment.
We evaluate our method on the R2R and R4R datasets and achieve state-of-the-art on several metrics. 
The experimental results demonstrate that generating hints not only enhances the navigation performance but also helps improve the agent's interpretability.

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UnMASKed: Quantifying Gender Biases in Masked Language Models through Linguistically Informed Job Market Prompts

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