Depression is a highly prevalent condition recognized by the World Health Organization as a leading contributor to global disability. Many people suffering from depression express their thoughts and feelings using social media, which thus becomes a source of data for research in this domain. However, existing annotation schemes tailored to studying depression symptoms in social media data remain limited. Reliable and valid annotation guidelines are crucial for accurately measuring mental health conditions for those studies. This paper addresses this gap by presenting a novel depression annotation scheme and guidelines for detecting depression symptoms and their severity in social media text. Our approach leverages validated depression questionnaires and incorporates the expertise of psychologists and psychiatrists during scheme refinement. The resulting annotation scheme achieves high inter-rater agreement, demonstrating its potential for suitable depression assessment in social media contexts.

Monitoring Depression Severity and Symptoms in User-Generated Content: An Annotation Scheme and Guidelines

Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is a common condition, affecting a significant portion of the population. While research suggests spending time in nature can alleviate anxiety, the specific impact on SAD remains unclear. This study ex- plores the relationship between discussions of outdoor spaces and social anxiety on social me- dia. We leverage transformer-based and large language models (LLMs) to analyze a social media dataset focused on SAD. We developed three methods for the task of predicting the effects of outdoor spaces on SAD in social me- dia. A two-stage pipeline classifier achieved the best performance of our submissions with results exceeding baseline performance.

LAMA at SMM4H 2024: Experimenting with Transformer-based and Large Language Models for Classifying Effects of Outdoor Spaces on Social Anxiety in Social Media Data

For numerous years, researchers have employed social media data to gain insights into users' mental health. Nevertheless, the majority of investigations concentrate on categorizing users into those experiencing depression and those considered healthy, or on detection of suicidal thoughts. In this paper, we aim to extract evidence of a pre-assigned gold label. We used a suicidality dataset containing Reddit posts labeled with the suicide risk level. The task is to use Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract evidence from the post that justifies the given label. We used Meta Llama 7b and lexicons for solving the task and we achieved a precision of 0.96.

Using Large Language Models (LLMs) to Extract Evidence from Pre-Annotated Social Media Data

Machine Translation Quality Estimation (QE) aims to build predictive models to assess the quality of machine-generated translations in the absence of reference translations. While state-of-the-art QE models have been shown to achieve good results, they over-rely on features that do not have a causal impact on the quality of a translation. In particular, there appears to be a partial input bias, i.e., a tendency to assign high-quality scores to translations that are fluent and grammatically correct, even though they do not preserve the meaning of the source. We analyse the partial input bias in further detail and evaluate four approaches to use auxiliary tasks for bias mitigation. Two approaches use additional data to inform and support the main task, while the other two are adversarial, actively discouraging the model from learning the bias. We compare the methods with respect to their ability to reduce the partial input bias while maintaining the overall performance. We find that training a multitask architecture with an auxiliary binary classification task that utilises additional augmented data best achieves the desired effects and generalises well to different languages and quality metrics.

Bias Mitigation in Machine Translation Quality Estimation

Vision-Informed Natural Language Processing

Neural Machine Translation models are sensitive to noise in the input texts, such as misspelled words and ungrammatical constructions. Existing robustness techniques generally fail when faced with unseen types of noise and their performance degrades on clean texts. In this paper, we focus on three types of realistic noise that are commonly generated by humans and introduce the idea of visual context to improve translation robustness for noisy texts. In addition, we describe a novel error
correction training regime that can be used as an auxiliary task to further improve translation robustness. Experiments on EnglishFrench and English-German translation show that both multimodal and error correction components improve model robustness to noisy texts, while still retaining translation quality on clean texts.

Visual Cues and Error Correction for Translation Robustness

Current Machine Translation (MT) systems achieve very good results on a growing variety of language pairs and datasets. However, they are known to produce fluent translation outputs that can contain important meaning errors, thus undermining their reliability in practice. Quality Estimation (QE) is the task of automatically assessing the performance of MT systems at test time. Thus, in order to be useful, QE systems should be able to detect such errors. However, this ability is yet to be tested in the current evaluation practices, where QE systems are assessed only in terms of their correlation with human judgements. In this work, we bridge this gap by proposing a general methodology for adversarial testing of QE for MT. First, we show that despite a high correlation with human judgements achieved by the recent SOTA, certain types of meaning errors are still problematic for QE to detect. Second, we show that on average, the ability of a given model to discriminate between meaning-preserving and meaning-altering perturbations is predictive of its overall performance, thus potentially allowing for comparing QE systems without relying on manual quality annotation.

Pushing the Right Buttons: Adversarial Evaluation of Quality Estimation

This paper presents Imperial College London's submissions to the WMT21 Quality Estimation (QE) Shared Task 3: Critical Error Detection. Our approach builds on cross-lingual pre-trained representations in a sequence classification model. We further improve the base classifier by (i) adding a weighted sampler to deal with unbalanced data and (ii) introducing feature engineering, where features related to toxicity, named-entities and sentiment, which are potentially indicative of critical errors, are extracted using existing tools and integrated to the model in different ways. We train models with one type of feature at a time and ensemble those models that improve over the base classifier on the development (dev) set. Our official submissions achieve very competitive results, ranking second for three out of four language pairs.

ICL's Submission to the WMT21 Critical Error Detection Shared Task

In order to simplify sentences, several rewriting operations can be performed such as replacing complex words per simpler synonyms, deleting unnecessary information, and splitting long sentences. Despite this multi-operation nature, evaluation of automatic simplification systems relies on metrics that moderately correlate with human judgements on the simplicity achieved by executing specific operations (e.g.\ simplicity gain based on lexical replacements). In this article, we investigate how well existing metrics can assess sentence-level simplifications where multiple operations may have been applied and which, therefore, require more general simplicity judgements. For that, we first collect a new and more reliable dataset for evaluating the correlation of metrics and human judgements of overall simplicity. Second, we conduct the first meta-evaluation of automatic metrics in Text Simplification, using our new dataset (and other existing data) to analyse the variation of the correlation between metrics' scores and human judgements across three dimensions: the perceived simplicity level, the system type and the set of references used for computation. We show that these three aspects affect the correlations and, in particular, highlight the limitations of commonly-used operation-specific metrics. Finally, based on our findings, we propose a set of recommendations for automatic evaluation of multi-operation simplifications, suggesting which metrics to compute and how to interpret their scores.

The (Un)Suitability of Automatic Evaluation Metrics for Text Simplification

We propose a generative framework for simultaneous machine translation. Conventional approaches use a fixed number of source words to translate or learn dynamic policies for the number of source words by reinforcement learning. Here we formulate simultaneous translation as a structural sequence-to-sequence learning problem. A latent variable is introduced to model read or translate actions at every time step, which is then integrated out to consider all the possible translation policies. A re-parameterised Poisson prior is used to regularise the policies which allows the model to explicitly balance translation quality and latency. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the generative framework, which achieves the best BLEU scores given different average translation latencies on benchmark datasets.

A Generative Framework for Simultaneous Machine Translation

We introduce deepQuest-py, a framework for training and evaluation of large and light-weight models for Quality Estimation (QE). deepQuest-py provides access to (1) state-of-the-art models based on pre-trained Transformers for sentence-level and word-level QE; (2) light-weight and efficient sentence-level models implemented via knowledge distillation; and (3) a web interface for testing models and visualising their predictions. deepQuest-py is available at https://github.com/sheffieldnlp/deepQuest-py under a CC BY-NC-SA licence.

deepQuest-py: Large and Distilled Models for Quality Estimation

Neural Machine Translation models are sensitive to noise in the input texts, such as misspelled words and ungrammatical constructions. Existing robustness techniques generally fail when faced with unseen types of noise and their performance degrades on clean texts. In this paper, we focus on three types of realistic noise that are commonly generated by humans and introduce the idea of visual context to improve translation robustness for noisy texts. In addition, we describe a novel error correction training regime that can be used as an auxiliary task to further improve translation robustness. Experiments on English-French and English-German translation show that both multimodal and error correction components improve model robustness to noisy texts, while still retaining translation quality on clean texts.

We present BERTGen, a novel, generative, decoder-only model which extends BERT by fusing multimodal and multilingual pre-trained models VL-BERT and M-BERT, respectively. BERTGen is auto-regressively trained for language generation tasks, namely image captioning, machine translation and multimodal machine translation, under a multi-task setting. With a comprehensive set of evaluations, we show that BERTGen outperforms many strong baselines across the tasks explored. We also show BERTGen's ability for zero-shot language generation, where it exhibits competitive performance to supervised counterparts. Finally, we conduct ablation studies which demonstrate that BERTGen substantially benefits from multi-tasking and effectively transfers relevant inductive biases from the pre-trained models.

BERTGen: Multi-task Generation through BERT

Quality Estimation (QE) is the task of automatically predicting Machine Translation quality in the absence of reference translations, making it applicable in real-time settings, such as translating online social media conversations. Recent success in QE stems from the use of multilingual pre-trained representations, where very large models lead to impressive results. However, the inference time, disk and memory requirements of such models do not allow for wide usage in the real world. Models trained on distilled pre-trained representations remain prohibitively large for many usage scenarios. We instead propose to directly transfer knowledge from a strong QE teacher model to a much smaller model with a different, shallower architecture. We show that this approach, in combination with data augmentation, leads to light-weight QE models that perform competitively with distilled pre-trained representations with 8x fewer parameters.

Knowledge Distillation for Quality Estimation

Machine translation (MT) is currently evaluated

SentSim: Crosslingual Semantic Evaluation of Machine Translation

*Coffee Breaks will be provided between 10:30 and 11:00 and 15:30 and 16:00.* To view the workshop program in detail, click [here](https://workshop-wassa.github.io/2024/schedule/) [![](https://assets.underline.io/markdown_image/1/image/12613369ab2f6dd75393ffa8794ccdd3.png)](https://app.gather.town/app/7Rf2IGR6LODvPyOx/ACL2024Workshops?spawnToken=bXLFSgsfQRy_5gc4ywWb)

W15: The 14th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment & Social Media Analysis (WASSA)

workshop paper

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

You are required to register for this event. **Please register [here](https://2024.aclweb.org/registration). **

If you have already registered, please check your inbox for an email from Underline granting you access to ACL 2024 content.

Please register!

ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

*Coffee Breaks will be provided between 10:30 and 11:00 and 15:30 and 16:00.* To view the workshop program in detail, click [here](https://healthlanguageprocessing.org/smm4h-2024) [![](https://assets.underline.io/markdown_image/1/image/12613369ab2f6dd75393ffa8794ccdd3.png)](https://app.gather.town/app/7Rf2IGR6LODvPyOx/ACL2024Workshops?spawnToken=aI4eiQZBTZKf1JbpYC2P)

W12: The 9th Social Media Mining for Health Research and Applications Workshop and Shared Tasks (#SMM4H 2024): Large Language Models and Generalizability for Social Media NLP

Since 2014, CLPsych has brought together researchers in computational linguistics and NLP, who use computational methods to better understand human language, infer meaning and intention, and predict individuals’ characteristics and potential behavior, with mental health practitioners and researchers, who are focused on psychopathology and neurological health and engage directly with the needs of providers and their patients. This workshop’s distinctly interdisciplinary nature has improved the exchange of knowledge, fostered collaboration, and increased the visibility of mental health as a problem domain in NLP.

Together, we hope to be able to advance the common goal of using human language as a tool to better understand emotional and mental state, and to reduce emotional suffering and the potential for self-harm. Now in its tenth year, the theme of this anniversary edition will be reflection: on the history of CLPsych, the progress in the field, and where new developments, both technological and in society, may lead us in the future. [**Read more**](https://clpsych.org/) [**Invited Speakers**](https://clpsych.org/program/) **Program Overview** 
08:45 - 09:00 Workshop Intro 
09:00 - 09:45 Keynote 1 
09:45 - 10:30 Shared Task Session 
10:30 - 11:00 Break 
11:00 - 11:45 Poster Session 
11:45 - 12:45 Paper Session 1 
12:45 - 14:00 Lunch 
14:00 - 15:00 Panel 
15:00 - 15:45 Keynote 2 
15:45 - 16:15 Break 
16:15 - 17:15 Paper Session 2 
17:15 - 17:30 Closing Remarks [**Detailed Program**](https://clpsych.org/program/)

W2: Ninth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych)

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. 
#### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/13Wn38q0yev6U3RTgnf4Tn5T9GuAuZ-xW/view?usp=sharing) *downloadable*

To access the EACL 2024 event page you need to register [**here**](https://acl.swoogo.com/EACL2024). 

EACL 2024

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.

Posters: Machine Translation and Multilinguality

poster

# 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). 

**Chair:** Leandro Henrique Mendonça De Oliveira 
**Presenter:** [Lucia Specia](https://underline.io/speakers/11493-lucia-specia) **Title:** Vision-Informed Natural Language Processing
 **Abstract:** NLP has come a long away from rules-based
approaches with limited scope for generalisability to versatile deep neural
architectures that achieve close-to-human performance in a number of applications, especially for sentence-level understanding or generation. Yet, language poses a number of challenges that cannot be solved when
processing is limited to sentential information. An interesting direction to further advance NLP is that of making models more context-aware. In
this talk, I will introduce research in this direction, focusing on exploring context in another modality: vision. I will cover recent approaches to multimodal machine learning involving language and vision and concentrate on the application of multimodal simultaneous machine
translation. Simultaneous machine translation aims to translate a continuous input text stream into another language with the lowest latency and highest quality possible. I will present our current work in this direction, where we study the impact of different multimodal approaches and visual features to make models better at anticipating the missing source context.

Plenary Talk Lucia Specia (Imperial College)

keynote

**BRACIS** originated from the combination of the two most important scientific events in Brazil in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computational Intelligence (CI): the Brazilian Symposium on Artificial Intelligence – **SBIA** (22 editions), and the Brazilian Symposium on Neural Networks – **SBRN** (13 editions). **ENIAC** is a national forum for researchers, practitioners, educators and students to present and discuss innovations, trends, experiences, developments and work in progress in the fields of Artificial and Computational Intelligence. **STIL** is the bi-annual Language Technology event.
All events are supported by the Brazilian Computer Society – Special Interest Groups: **CE-IA**, **CE-IC** and **CE-PLN**.

To access the 10th Brazilian Conference on Intelligent Systems (**BRACIS**), you need to register for the conference.  Please visit the Conference official site to register

[Register now](http://c4ai.inova.usp.br/bracis2021/)

Register now

BRACIS 2021

BRACIS originated from the combination of the two most important scientific events in Brazil in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computational Intelligence (CI): the Brazilian Symposium on Artificial Intelligence – SBIA (22 editions), and the Brazilian Symposium on Neural Networks – SBRN (13 editions). 
ENIAC is a national forum for researchers, practitioners, educators and students to present and discuss innovations, trends, experiences, developments and work in progress in the fields of Artificial and Computational Intelligence. 
STIL is the bi-annual Language Technology event.
All events are supported by the Brazilian Computer Society – Special Interest Groups: CE-IA, CE-IC and CE-PLN



[![](https://s3.amazonaws.com/pf-upload-01/u-59356/0/2021-09-18/me23j72/button_workshop-website.png)](http://noisy-text.github.io/) 

W7: 7th Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT 2021) Part I

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

<iframe style="width:700px;height:400px" src="https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/ceby/" seamless="seamless" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allowfullscreen="true" ></iframe>

Please Note: The EMNLP registration system is not currently connected to the underline site as we are still in the process of building out EMNLP 2021. You will receive access instructions from underline the week of November 1st. 

Access is given only to EMNLP upon registration, if you have not registered please do so [here](https://2021.emnlp.org/registration).

Registered attendees will receive access the week of November 1st.

EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.



[![](https://s3.amazonaws.com/pf-upload-01/u-59356/0/2021-09-18/me23j72/button_workshop-website.png)](http://www.statmt.org/wmt21/) 

W11: Sixth Conference on Machine Translation Day 1

**Session Chair: **Annemarie Friedrich 
**In Person Volunteer:** Da Yin 
** Remote Volunteer:** Ayush Jain

5E: Resources and Evaluation 2

technical paper

Virtual Poster Session II: Resources and Evaluation

**Session Chair: **Rico Sennrich 
**In Person Volunteer:** Ashkan Alinejad 
** Remote Volunteer:** Amit Kumar

6C: Machine Translation and Multilinguality 2

Virtual Demo III

demo

Findings Papers - Speech, Vision, Robotics, Multimodal Grounding

**Session Chair: ** Shashi Narayan 
**Session Volunteer: ** Diptesh Kanojia

14A: Language Generation #2

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

As in previous years, the program of the conference includes a poster session, tutorials, workshops and demonstrations in addition to the main conference.


We were able to keep the registration fees similar to those charged for the virtual ACL 2020. The one fee allows attendance at the main conference and any/all tutorials and workshops. These fees would be $125 Regular Early and $175 Regular Late; $50 Student Early and $75 Student Late. Early registration closes at midnight July 11, 2021 (Eastern Daylight Time).

**Reminder:** It is ACL’s policy that at least one author of each accepted paper (including ACL Finding papers) must register for the conference.

**Reminder2:** Underline site will open closer to the event. If you already registered you will receive access detail

Registration is now open

IJCNLP-AACL 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

Findings Papers - Multidisciplinary and Area Chair COI

**Session Chair: ** Pradeep Dasigi

9D-Oral: Language Resources and Evaluation

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>

Lucia Specia

18

5

SHORT BIO

Presentations

Monitoring Depression Severity and Symptoms in User-Generated Content: An Annotation Scheme and Guidelines

LAMA at SMM4H 2024: Experimenting with Transformer-based and Large Language Models for Classifying Effects of Outdoor Spaces on Social Anxiety in Social Media Data

Using Large Language Models (LLMs) to Extract Evidence from Pre-Annotated Social Media Data

Bias Mitigation in Machine Translation Quality Estimation

Vision-Informed Natural Language Processing

Visual Cues and Error Correction for Translation Robustness

Pushing the Right Buttons: Adversarial Evaluation of Quality Estimation

ICL's Submission to the WMT21 Critical Error Detection Shared Task

The (Un)Suitability of Automatic Evaluation Metrics for Text Simplification

The (Un)Suitability of Automatic Evaluation Metrics for Text Simplification

A Generative Framework for Simultaneous Machine Translation

deepQuest-py: Large and Distilled Models for Quality Estimation

Visual Cues and Error Correction for Translation Robustness

BERTGen: Multi-task Generation through BERT

Knowledge Distillation for Quality Estimation

SentSim: Crosslingual Semantic Evaluation of Machine Translation

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES