Malta

Despite the widespread adoption, there is a lack of research into how various critical aspects of pretrained language models (PLMs) affect their performance in hate speech detection. Through five research questions, our findings and recommendations lay the groundwork for empirically investigating different aspects of PLMs&#39; use in hate speech detection. We deep dive into comparing different pretrained models, evaluating their seed robustness, finetuning settings, and the impact of pretraining data collection time. Our analysis reveals early peaks for downstream tasks during pretraining, the limited benefit of employing a more recent pretraining corpus, and the significance of specific layers during finetuning. We further call into question the use of domain-specific models and highlight the need for dynamic datasets for benchmarking hate speech detection.

EACL 2024

Probing Critical Learning Dynamics of PLMs for Hate Speech Detection

hate speech analysis

pretrained language models

hate speech detection

Despite the widespread adoption, there is a lack of research into how various critical aspects of pretrained language models (PLMs) affect their performance in hate speech detection. Through five research questions, our findings and recommendations lay the groundwork for empirically investigating different aspects of PLMs' use in hate speech detection. We deep dive into comparing different pretrained models, evaluating their seed robustness, finetuning settings, and the impact of pretraining data collection time. Our analysis reveals early peaks for downstream tasks during pretraining, the limited benefit of employing a more recent pretraining corpus, and the significance of specific layers during finetuning. We further call into question the use of domain-specific models and highlight the need for dynamic datasets for benchmarking hate speech detection.

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.

Recent advances in NLP show that language models retain a discernible level of knowledge in deontological ethics and moral norms. However, existing works often treat morality as binary, ranging from right to wrong. This simplistic view does not capture the nuances of moral judgment. Pluralist moral philosophers argue that human morality can be deconstructed into a finite number of elements, respecting individual differences in moral judgment. In line with this view, we build a pluralist moral sentence embedding space via a state-of-the-art contrastive learning approach. We systematically investigate the embedding space by studying the emergence of relationships among moral elements, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Our results show that a pluralist approach to morality can be captured in an embedding space. However, moral pluralism is challenging to deduce via self-supervision alone and requires a supervised approach with human labels.

Morality is Non-Binary: Building a Pluralist Moral Sentence Embedding Space using Contrastive Learning

This study focuses on media bias detection, crucial in today's era of influential social media platforms shaping individual attitudes and opinions. In contrast to prior work that primarily relies on training specific models tailored to particular datasets, resulting in limited adaptability and subpar performance on out-of-domain data, we introduce a general bias detection framework, IndiVec, built upon large language models. IndiVec begins by constructing a fine-grained media bias database, leveraging the robust instruction-following capabilities of large language models and vector database techniques. When confronted with new input for bias detection, our framework automatically selects the most relevant indicator from the vector database and employs majority voting to determine the input's bias label. IndiVec excels compared to previous methods due to its adaptability (demonstrating consistent performance across diverse datasets from various sources) and explainability (providing explicit top-k indicators to interpret bias predictions). Experimental results on four political bias datasets highlight IndiVec's significant superiority over baselines. Furthermore, additional experiments and analysis provide profound insights into the framework's effectiveness.

IndiVec: An Exploration of Leveraging Large Language Models for Media Bias Detection with Fine-Grained Bias Indicators

There is an intricate relation between the properties of an image and how humans behave while describing the image. This behavior shows ample variation, as manifested in human signals such as eye movements and when humans start to describe the image. Despite the value of such signals of visuo-linguistic variation, they are virtually disregarded in the training of current pretrained models, which motivates further investigation. Using a corpus of Dutch image descriptions with concurrently collected eye-tracking data, we explore the nature of the variation in visuo-linguistic signals, and find that they correlate with each other. Given this result, we hypothesize that variation stems partly from the properties of the images, and explore whether image representations encoded by pretrained vision encoders can capture such variation. Our results indicate that pretrained models do so to a weak-to-moderate degree, suggesting that the models lack biases about what makes a stimulus complex for humans and what leads to variations in human outputs.

Describing Images Fast and Slow: Quantifying and Predicting the Variation in Human Signals during Visuo-Linguistic Processes

Bias mitigation of Language Models has been the topic of many studies with a recent focus on learning separate modules like adapters for on-demand debiasing. Besides optimizing for a modularized debiased model, it is often critical in practice to control the degree of bias reduction at inference time, e.g., in order to tune for a desired performance-fairness trade-off in search results or to control the strength of debiasing in classification tasks. In this paper, we introduce Controllable Gate Adapter (ConGater), a novel modular gating mechanism with adjustable sensitivity parameters, %In addition to better perseverance of task performance and enhanced information removal, 
which allows for a gradual transition from the biased state of the model to the fully debiased version at inference time. We demonstrate ConGater performance by (1) conducting adversarial debiasing experiments with three different models on three classification tasks with four protected attributes, and (2) reducing the bias of search results through fairness list-wise regularization to enable adjusting a trade-off between performance and fairness metrics. Our experiments on the classification tasks show that compared to baselines of the same caliber, ConGater can maintain higher task performance while containing less information regarding the attributes. Our results on the retrieval task show that the fully debiased ConGater can achieve the same fairness performance while maintaining more than twice as high task performance than recent strong baselines. Overall, besides strong performance ConGater enables the continuous transitioning between biased and debiased states of models, enhancing personalization of use and interpretability through controllability.

Effective Controllable Bias Mitigation for Classification and Retrieval using Gate Adapters

As NLP models become increasingly capable of understanding documents in terms of coherent entities rather than strings, obtaining the most salient entities for each document is not only an important end task in itself but also vital for Information Retrieval (IR) and other downstream applications such as controllable summarization. In this paper, we present and evaluate GUMsley, the first entity salience dataset covering all named and non-named salient entities for 12 genres of English text, aligned with entity types, Wikification links and full coreference resolution annotations. We promote a strict definition of salience using human summaries and demonstrate high inter-annotator agreement for salience based on whether a source entity is mentioned in the summary. Our evaluation shows poor performance by pre-trained SOTA summarization models and zero-shot LLM prompting in capturing salient entities in generated summaries. We also show that predicting or providing salient entities to several model architectures enhances performance and helps derive higher-quality summaries by alleviating the entity hallucination problem in existing abstractive summarization.

GUMsley: Evaluating Entity Salience in Summarization for 12 English Genres

Kremlin propaganda campaigns aim to minimize public support for Ukraine, foster a climate of mistrust and disunity, and shape elections. To address this challenge, we developed “Check News in 1 Click”, the first NLP-empowered pro-Kremlin propaganda detection app available in 7 languages. It provides the lay user with feedback on their news and explains manipulative linguistic features and keywords. The conducted user study shows positive feedback from users and sheds light on the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed solution.


Check News in One Click: NLP-Empowered Pro-Kremlin Propaganda Detection

The long-standing problem of spam and fraudulent messages in the comment sections of Instagram pages in the financial sector claims new victims every day. Instagram’s current spam filter proves inadequate, and existing research approaches are primarily confined to theoretical concepts. Practical implementations with evaluated results are missing. To solve this problem, we propose ScamSpot, a comprehensive system that includes a browser extension, a fine-tuned BERT model and a REST API. This approach ensures public accessibility of our results for Instagram users using the Chrome browser. Furthermore, we conduct a data annotation study, shedding light on the reasons and causes of the problem and evaluate the system through user feedback and comparison with existing models. ScamSpot is an open-source project and is publicly available at https://scamspot.github.io/.

ScamSpot: Fighting Financial Fraud in Instagram Comments

In this paper, we introduce NarrativePlay, a novel system that allows users to role-play a fictional character and interact with other characters in narratives in an immersive environment. We leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate human-like responses, guided by personality traits extracted from narratives. The system incorporates auto-generated visual display of narrative settings, character portraits, and character speech, greatly enhancing the user experience. Our approach eschews predefined sandboxes, focusing instead on main storyline events from the perspective of a user-selected character. NarrativePlay has been evaluated on two types of narratives, detective and adventure stories, where users can either explore the world or increase affinity with other characters through conversations.

NarrativePlay: Interactive Narrative Understanding

We present the DURel tool that implements the annotation of semantic proximity between uses of words into an online, open source interface. The tool supports standardized human annotation as well as computational annotation, building on recent advances with Word-in-Context models. Annotator judgments are clustered with automatic graph clustering techniques and visualized for analysis. This allows to measure word senses with simple and intuitive micro-task judgments between use pairs, requiring minimal preparation efforts. The tool offers additional functionalities to compare the agreement between annotators to guarantee the inter-subjectivity of the obtained judgments and to calculate summary statistics giving insights into sense frequency distributions, semantic variation or changes of senses over time.

The DURel Annotation Tool: Human and Computational Measurement of Semantic Proximity, Sense Clusters and Semantic Change

The abundance of news sources and the urgent
demand for reliable information have led to se-
rious concerns about the threat of misleading
information. In this paper, we present FRAPPE,
a FRAming, Persuasion, and Propaganda Ex-
plorer system. FRAPPE goes beyond conven-
tional news analysis of articles and unveils the
intricate linguistic techniques used to shape
readers’ opinions and emotions. Our system
allows users not only to analyze individual arti-
cles for their genre, framings, and use of persua-
sion techniques, but also to draw comparisons
between the strategies of persuasion and fram-
ing adopted by a diverse pool of news outlets
and countries across multiple languages for dif-
ferent topics, thus providing a comprehensive
understanding of how information is presented
and manipulated. FRAPPE1 is publicly acces-
sible at https://frappe.streamlit.
app/ and a video explaining our system
is available at https://youtu.be/3RlTfSVnZmk

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Morality is Non-Binary: Building a Pluralist Moral Sentence Embedding Space using Contrastive Learning

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