Mexico

Memes play a key role in most modern information campaigns, particularly propaganda campaigns. Identifying the persuasive techniques present in memes is an important step in developing systems to recognize and curtail propaganda. This work presents a framework to identify the persuasive techniques present in memes for the SemEval 2024 Task 4, according to a hierarchical taxonomy of propaganda techniques. The framework involves a knowledge distillation method, where the base model is a combination of DeBERTa and ResNET used to classify the text and image, and the teacher model consists of a group of weakly enforced logic rules that promote the hierarchy of persuasion techniques. The addition of the logic rule layer for knowledge distillation shows improvement in respecting the hierarchy of the taxonomy with a slight boost in performance.

NAACL 2024

Pauk at SemEval-2024 Task 4: A Neuro-Symbolic Method for Consistent Classification of Propaganda Techniques in Memes

neuro-symbolic

knowledge distillation

workshop paper

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
The opportunity to present at NAACL should not depend on a researcher’s travel budget, or their family status. This is why it is so important to make virtual participation at NAACL as good an experience as possible – but we want to also provide a good experience for in-person participants. As a community, we are still working out the best way to do that. This year at NAACL, we are trying out a big virtual poster session ahead of the conference, with the hope that this will make make for a lively and interactive experience. At the same time, we are reducing virtual oral presentations, which seem to be particularly tricky to make to work well. A big thanks to the NAACL program chairs and to Luciana Benotti for all their ideas and work to improve the virtual experience. And participants, virtual as well as in-person: Please let us know what worked for you and what didn’t, so we can continue to improve hybrid conferences. 
 
I have been lucky to work with many amazing people. Without their insight, dedication and patience, and without the many hours of work they put in, NAACL would not have been possible. A huge thank you to the program chairs Helena Gomez, Kevin Duh, and Steve Bethard – you are the best! 
 
Finally, I would like to thank all authors, invited speakers and panelists, area chairs and reviewers, the volunteers organizing and chairing sessions, and all attendees, in-person and virtual. Thank you for helping us make NAACL 2024 come to life. 
 
Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
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2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

We present the methodology of team whatdoyoumeme for the SemEval 2024 Task on Multilingual Persuasion Detection in Memes. We enhance detection capabilities by integrating hierarchical label information and employing a cross-lingual approach. Using translation, we adapt our model to Macedonian, Arabic, and Bulgarian. Our methodology includes analyzing meme content and extending labels to incorporate hierarchical structures. This approach demonstrates improved model performance in multilingual contexts, highlighting the effectiveness of translation-based methods and hierarchy-aware learning over traditional baselines.

whatdoyoumeme at SemEval-2024 Task 4: Hierarchical-label aware cross-lingual persuasion detection using translated texts

Combining transformer-based models such as DeBERTaV3 with thorough data augmentation can help to tackle the problem of detecting hybrid human-AI writing. With this pipeline we obtain new best score (according to the leaderboard) in the proposed task of finding a boundary between human-written and machine-generated parts of one text.

DeepPavlov at SemEval-2024 Task 8: Leveraging Transfer Learning for Detecting Boundaries of Machine-Generated Texts

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance across multiple domains in various natural language tasks. Entailment tasks, however, are more difficult to achieve with a high-performance model. The task is to use safe natural language models to conclude biomedical clinical trial reports (CTRs). The Natural Language Inference for Clinical Trial Data (NLI4CT) task aims to define a given entailment and hypothesis based on CTRs. This paper aims to address the challenges of medical abbreviations and numerical data that can be logically inferred from one another due to acronyms, using different data pre-processing techniques to explain such data. This paper presents a model for NLI4CT SemEval 2024 task 2 that trains the data with DeBERTa, BioLink, BERT, GPT2, BioGPT, and Clinical BERT using the best training approaches, such as fine-tuning, prompt tuning, and contrastive learning. Furthermore, to validate these models, different experiments have been carried out. Our best system is built on an ensemble of different models with different training settings, which achieves an F1 score of 0.77, a faithfulness score of 0.76, and a consistency score of 0.75 and secures the sixth rank in the official leaderboard. In conclusion, this paper has addressed challenges in medical text analysis by exploring various NLP techniques, evaluating multiple advanced natural language models(NLM) models and achieving good results with the ensemble model. Additionally, this project has contributed to the advancement of safe and effective NLMs for analysing complex medical data in CTRs.

CaresAI at SemEval-2024 Task 2: Improving Natural Language Inference in Clinical Trial Data using Model Ensemble and Data Explanation

Large Language Models (LLMs) are at the forefront of NLP achievements but fall short in dealing with shortcut learning, factual inconsistency, and vulnerability to adversarial inputs.These shortcomings are especially critical in medical contexts, where they can misrepresent actual model capabilities. Addressing this, we present SemEval-2024 Task 2: Safe Biomedical Natural Language Inference for ClinicalTrials. Our contributions include the refined NLI4CT-P dataset (i.e., Natural Language Inference for Clinical Trials - Perturbed), designed to challenge LLMs with interventional and causal reasoning tasks, along with a comprehensive evaluation of methods and results for participant submissions. A total of 106 participants registered for the task contributing to over 1200 individual submissions and 25 system overview papers. This initiative aims to advance the robustness and applicability of NLI models in healthcare, ensuring safer and more dependable AI assistance in clinical decision-making. We anticipate that the dataset, models, and outcomes of this task can support future research in the field of biomedical NLI. The dataset, competition leaderboard, and website are publicly available.

SemEval-2024 Task 2: Safe Biomedical Natural Language Inference for Clinical Trials

The ability to understand emotions is an essential component of human-like artificial intelligence, as emotions greatly influence human cognition, decision making, and social interactions. In addition to emotion recognition in conversations, the task of identifying the potential causes behind an individual’s emotional state in conversations, is of great importance in many application scenarios. We organize SemEval-2024 Task 3, named Multimodal Emotion Cause Analysis in Conversations, which aims at extracting all pairs of emotions and their corresponding causes from conversations. Under different modality settings, it consists of two subtasks: Textual Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction in Conversations (TECPE) and Multimodal Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction in Conversations (MECPE). The shared task has attracted 143 registrations and 216 successful submissions. In this presentation, we introduce the task, dataset and evaluation settings, summarize the systems of the top teams, and discuss the findings of the participants.

SemEval-2024 Task 3: Multimodal Emotion Cause Analysis in Conversations

In Japanese, loanwords are primarily written in Katakana, a syllabic writing system, based on their pronunciation. However, the transliterated loanwords often exhibit spelling variations, such as the word "Hepburn" being written as "ヘボン (hebon)", "ヘプバーン (hepubaan)", "ヘップバーン (heppubaan)". These orthographical variants pose a bottleneck in multilingual Named Entity Recognition (NER), because named entities (NEs) do not have one-to-one matches. In this study, we introduce a rule-based grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) system for Japanese based on literature in linguistics and a large-scale multilingual NE dataset with annotations of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), focusing on IPA to address the Katakana spelling variations in loanwords. These rules and dataset are expected to be beneficial for tasks such as NE aggregation, G2P system, construction of cross-lingual language models, and entity linking. We hope our work advances research on Japanese NER with multilingual loanwords by solving the spelling ambiguities.

Japanese Rule-based Grapheme-to-phoneme Conversion System and Multilingual Named Entity Dataset

How well does naturally-occurring digital text, such as Tweets, represent sub-dialects of Egyptian Arabic\,(EA)? This paper focuses on two EA sub-dialects: Cairene Egyptian Arabic (CEA) and Sa'idi Egyptian Arabic (SEA). We use morphological markers from ground-truth dialect surveys as a distance measure across four geo-referenced datasets. Results show that CEA markers are prevalent as expected in CEA geo-referenced tweets, while SEA markers are limited across SEA geo-referenced tweets. SEA tweets instead show a prevalence of CEA markers and higher usage of Modern Standard Arabic. We conclude that corpora intended to represent sub-dialects of EA do not accurately represent sub-dialects outside of the Cairene variety. This finding calls into question the validity of relying on tweets alone to represent dialectal differences.

How Well Do Tweets Represent Sub-Dialects of Egyptian Arabic?

Chavacano is a Spanish Creole widely spoken in the southern regions of the Philippines. It is one of the many Philippine languages yet to be studied computationally. This paper presents the development of a language identification model of Chavacano to distinguish it from languages that influence its creolization using character convolutional networks. Unlike studies that discriminated similar languages based on geographical proximity, this paper reports a similarity focused on the creolization of a language. We established the similarity of Chavacano and its related languages, Spanish, Portuguese, Cebuano, and Hiligaynon, from the number of common words in the corpus for all languages. We report an accuracy of 93% for the model generated using ten filters with a filter width of 5. The training experiments reveal that increasing the filter width, number of filters, or training epochs is unnecessary even if the accuracy increases because the generated models present irregular learning behavior or may have already been overfitted. This study also demonstrates that the character features extracted from convolutional neural networks, similar to n-grams, are sufficient in identifying Chavacano. Future work on the language identification of Chavacano includes improving classification accuracy for short or code-switched texts for practical applications such as social media sensors for disaster response and management.

Language Identification of Philippine Creole Spanish: Discriminating Chavacano from Related Languages

Whisper is a state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) model (Radford et al., 2022). Although Swiss German dialects are allegedly not part of Whisper's training data, preliminary experiments showed Whisper can transcribe Swiss German quite well, with the output being a speech translation into Standard German. To gain a better understanding of Whisper's performance on Swiss German, we systematically evaluate it using automatic, qualitative, and human evaluation. We test its performance on three existing test sets: SwissDial (Dogan-Schönberger et al., 2021), STT4SG-350 (Plüss et al., 2023), and Swiss Parliaments Corpus (Plüss et al., 2021). In addition, we create a new test set for this study based on short mock clinical interviews. 

To automatically evaluate performance, we used word error rate (WER) and BLEU. We also conducted a qualitative analysis of Whisper's performance, discussing its strengths and weaknesses. Finally, 28 people participated in a survey evaluating Whisper's performance. 

All of our evaluations showed that Whisper is a viable ASR system for Swiss German, so long as the Standard German output is desired.

Does Whisper Understand Swiss German? An Automatic, Qualitative, and Human Evaluation.

Effectively normalizing spellings in textual data poses a considerable challenge, especially for low-resource languages lacking standardized writing systems. In this study, we fine-tuned a multilingual model with data from several Occitan dialects and conducted a series of experiments to assess the model's representations of these dialects. For evaluation purposes, we compiled a parallel lexicon encompassing four Occitan dialects.
Intrinsic evaluations of the model's embeddings revealed that surface similarity between the dialects strengthened representations. When the model was further fine-tuned for part-of-speech tagging, its performance was robust to dialectical variation, even when trained solely on part-of-speech data from a single dialect. Our findings suggest that large multilingual models minimize the need for spelling normalization during pre-processing.

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Pauk at SemEval-2024 Task 4: A Neuro-Symbolic Method for Consistent Classification of Propaganda Techniques in Memes

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