The exponential surge of social media has enabled information propagation at an unprecedented rate. However, it also led to the generation of a vast amount of malign content, such as hateful memes. To eradicate the detrimental impact of this content, over the last few years hateful memes detection problem has grabbed the attention of researchers. However, most past studies were conducted primarily for English memes, while memes on resource-constraint languages (i.e., Bengali)
remain under-studied. Moreover, current research considers memes with a caption written in monolingual (either English or Bengali) form. However, memes might have code-mixed captions (English+Bangla), and the existing models can not provide accurate inference in such cases. Therefore, to facilitate research in this arena, this paper introduces a multimodal hate speech dataset (named MUTE) consisting of 4158 memes having Bengali and code-mixed captions. A detailed annotation guideline is provided to aid the dataset creation in other resource-constraint languages. Additionally, extensive experiments have been carried out on MUTE, considering the only visual, only textual, and both modalities. The result demonstrates that joint evaluation of visual and textual features significantly improves (≈ 3%) the hateful memes classification compared to the unimodal evaluation.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-srw.5/)


MUTE: A Multimodal Dataset for Detecting Hateful Memes

Recently, detection and categorization of undesired (e. g., aggressive, abusive, offensive, hate) content from online platforms has grabbed the attention of researchers because of its detrimental impact on society. Several attempts have been made to mitigate the usage and propagation of such content. However, most past studies were conducted primarily for English, where low-resource languages like Bengali remained out of the focus. Therefore, to facilitate research in this arena, this paper introduces a novel multilabel Bengali dataset (named M-BAD) containing 15650 texts to detect aggressive texts and their targets. Each text of M-BAD went through rigorous two-level annotations. At the primary level, each text is labelled as either aggressive or non-aggressive. In the secondary level, the aggressive texts have been further annotated into five fine-grained target classes: religion, politics, verbal, gender and race. Baseline experiments are carried out with different machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL) and transformer models, where Bangla-BERT acquired the highest weighted f_1-score in both detection (0.92) and target identification (0.83) tasks. Error analysis of the models exhibits the difficulty to identify context-dependent aggression, and this work argues that further research is required to address these issues.

M-BAD: A Multilabel Dataset for Detecting Aggressive Texts and Their Targets

Although research on emotion classification has significantly progressed in high-resource languages, it is still infancy for resource-constrained languages like Bengali. However, unavailability of necessary language processing tools and deficiency of benchmark corpora makes the emotion classification task in Bengali more challenging and complicated. This work proposes a transformer-based technique to classify the Bengali text into one of the six basic emotions: anger, fear, disgust, sadness, joy, and surprise. A Bengali emotion corpus consists of 6243 texts is developed for the classification task. Experimentation carried out using various machine learning (LR, RF, MNB, SVM), deep neural networks (CNN, BiLSTM, CNN+BiLSTM) and transformer (Bangla-BERT, m-BERT, XLM-R) based approaches. Experimental outcomes indicate that XLM-R outdoes all other techniques by achieving the highest weighted f_1-score of 69.73% on the test data. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/omar-sharif03/NAACL-SRW-2021.

Emotion Classification in a Resource Constrained Language Using Transformer-based Approach

**Workshop Organizers:**
 Hanqi Yan, Zonghan Yang, Xiaojun Wan, and Sebastian Ruder

Student Research Workshop

workshop paper

The AACL, Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the AFNLP, Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, invite you to participate in the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL) and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP).

A registration is required to access this event. Access to the event site will be granted to all registered attendees on **November 16th**. If you have not already done so, please register using the link below:
 
 https://conference.iis.sinica.edu.tw/servlet/Register?ConferenceID=411

Registration Is Required

IJCNLP-AACL 2022

The AACL, Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the AFNLP, Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, invite you to participate in the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL) and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP). 

**Organizers:** Tanmoy Chakraborty, Md. Shad Akhtar, Kai Shu, H. Russell Bernard, Maria Liakata, Preslav
Nakov
 **Description:** The increasing accessibility of the Internet has dramatically changed the way we consume information. The ease of
social media usage not only encourages individuals to freely express their opinion (freedom of speech) but also provides
content polluters with ecosystems to spread hostile posts (hate speech, fake news, cyberbullying, propaganda, etc.). Such
hostile activities are expected to increase manifold during emergencies such as the presidential election and COVID19 pandemic spreading. Most of such hostile posts are written in regional languages, and therefore can easily evade
online surveillance engines that are majority trained on the posts written in resource-rich languages such as English and
Chinese. Therefore, regions such as Asia, Africa, South America, where low-resource regional languages are used for
day-to-day communication, suffer due to the lack of tools, benchmark datasets and learning techniques. Other developing
countries such as Italy, Spain, where the used languages (pseudo-low-resource) are not as equipped with sophisticated
computational resources as English, might also be facing the same issues. Following the success of the first edition of
CONSTRAINT (collocated with AAAI-21), the second edition will encourage researchers from interdisciplinary domains
working on multilingual social media analytics to think beyond the conventional way of combating online hostile posts.
 
**Please visit our [website](https://lcs2.iiitd.edu.in/CONSTRAINT-2022/)**

(CONSTRAINT) The Second Workshop on Combating Online Hostile Posts in Regional Languages during Emergency Situations 

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Mini Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlBKl0wzmlVF1oCeMQl3BahLd9nLP5Ce/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Posters and Demo guides**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UucMAoCNncIOaH1rMMDa0owuG9qgvJTG/view?usp=sharing)

ACL 2022

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

**Session Chair: ** Yu Su

5F-Oral: Student Research Workshop 3

technical paper

2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

**Whova App** 
Stay in touch with your fellow conference attendees via the [Whova App](https://whova.com/portal/webapp/nacon_202106/)

**Conference Structure**
https://2021.naacl.org/blog/conference-structure/

**Walkthrough video of how to NAACL 2021** 

Please take a moment to view this video explaining how to navigate the platform, attend sessions network with other attendees. 


<figure class="video_container">
 <iframe src="https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/crhwbGVh3vx?v=6&ff=1&title=0&controls=1" width=640 height=350 frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="true"> </iframe>
</figure>

Omar Sharif

3

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SHORT BIO

Presentations

MUTE: A Multimodal Dataset for Detecting Hateful Memes

M-BAD: A Multilabel Dataset for Detecting Aggressive Texts and Their Targets

Emotion Classification in a Resource Constrained Language Using Transformer-based Approach

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

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