Recent advances in NLP have significantly improved the performance of language models on a variety of tasks. While these advances are largely driven by the availability of large amounts of data and computational power, they also benefit from the development of better training methods and architectures. In this paper, we introduce CamemBERTa, a French DeBERTa model that builds upon the DeBERTaV3 architecture and training objective. We evaluate our model's performance on a variety of French downstream tasks and datasets, including question answering, part-of-speech tagging, dependency parsing, named entity recognition, and the FLUE benchmark, and compare against CamemBERT, the state-of-the-art monolingual model for French. Our results show that, given the same amount of training tokens, our model outperforms BERT-based models trained with MLM on most tasks. Furthermore, our new model reaches similar or superior performance on downstream tasks compared to CamemBERT, despite being trained on only 30% of its total number of input tokens. In addition to our experimental results, we also publicly release the weights and code implementation of CamemBERTa, making it the first publicly available DeBERTaV3 model outside of the original paper and the first openly available implementation of a DeBERTaV3 training objective.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/6qSnTPZvioRLfFJpZUjhCw/embed/polls/7f22aa35-49e8-4f49-a4f1-310a245d6b31" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Data-Efficient French Language Modeling with CamemBERTa

Hate speech detection in online platforms has been widely studied in the past. Most of these works were conducted in English and a few rich-resource languages. Recent approaches tailored for low-resource languages have explored the interests of zero shot cross-lingual transfer learning models in resource-scarce scenarios. However, languages variations between geolects such as American English and British English, Latin-American Spanish, and European Spanish is still a problem for NLP models that often relies on (latent) lexical information for their classification tasks. More importantly, the cultural aspect, crucial for hate speech detection, is often overlooked.

In this work, we present the results of a thorough analysis of hate speech detection models performance on different variants of Spanish, including a new hate speech toward immigrants Twitter data set we built to cover these variants. Using mBERT and Beto, a monolingual Spanish Bert-based language model, as the basis of our transfer learning architecture, our results indicate that hate speech detection models for a given Spanish variant are affected when different variations of such language are not considered. Hate speech expressions could vary from region to region where the same language is spoken.

Analyzing Zero-Shot transfer Scenarios across Spanish variants for Hate Speech Detection

We propose our solution to the multimodal semantic role labeling task from the CONSTRAINT'22 workshop. The task aims at classifying entities in memes into classes such as ``hero'' and ``villain''. We use several pre-trained multi-modal models to jointly encode the text and image of the memes, and implement three systems to classify the role of the entities. We propose dynamic sampling strategies to tackle the issue of class imbalance. Finally, we perform a qualitative analysis of the representations of the entities.


Fine-tuning and Sampling Strategies for Multimodal Role Labeling of Entities under Class Imbalance

This work takes a critical look at the evaluation of user-generated content (UGC) automatic translation and the well-known specificities of which raise many challenges for MT. We introduce the PMUMT, a new data set for UGC translation evaluation. Using this data set, we conduct several experiments to measure the impact of different kinds of UGC specificities on translation quality, more precisely than previously possible.

Understanding the Impact of UGC Specificities on Translation Quality

This work explores the capacities of character-based Neural Machine Translation to translate noisy User-Generated Content (UGC). Within a strict zero-shot scenario, we first study the detrimental impact on translation performance of various UGC phenomena on an annotated dataset we developed, and then show that such models are indeed incapable of handling unknown characters, for which we propose a simple but efficient solution.

Noisy User-Generated Content Translation at the Character Level: Revisiting Open-Vocabulary Capabilities and Robustness of Char-Based Models

Recent impressive improvements in NLP, largely based on the success of contextual neural language models, have been mostly demonstrated on at most a couple of dozen high-resource languages. Building language models and, more generally, NLP systems for non-standardized and low-resource languages remains a challenging task. In this work, we focus on North-African colloquial dialectal Arabic written using an extension of the Latin script, calledNArabizi, found mostly on social media and messaging communication. In this low-resource scenario with data displaying a high level of variability, we compare the downstream performance of a character-based language model on part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing to that of monolingual and multilingual models. We show that a character-based model trained on only 99k sentences ofNArabiziand fined-tuned on a small treebank of this language leads to a performance close to those obtained with the same architecture pre-trained on large multilingual and monolingual models. Confirming these results a on much larger data set of noisy French user-generated content, we argue that such character-based language models can be an asset for NLP in low-resource and high language variability set-tings.

Can Character-based Language Models Improve Downstream Task Performances In Low-Resource And Noisy Language Scenarios?

Coupled with the availability of large-scale datasets, deep learning architectures have enabled rapid progress on Question Answering tasks. However, most of those datasets are in English, and the performances of state-of-the-art multilingual models are significantly lower when evaluated on non-English data.
Due to high data collection costs, it is not realistic to obtain annotated data for each language one desires to support. 
We propose a method to improve Cross-lingual Question Answering performance without requiring additional annotated data, leveraging Question Generation models to produce synthetic samples in a cross-lingual fashion.
We show that the proposed method allows to significantly outperform the baselines trained on English data only, establishing thus a new state-of-the-art on four multilingual datasets: MLQA, XQuAD, SQuAD-it and PIAF (fr).

Synthetic Data Augmentation for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Question Answering

Coupled with the availability of large-scale datasets, deep learning architectures have enabled rapid progress on Question Answering tasks. However, most of those datasets are in English, and the performances of state-of-the-art multilingual models are significantly lower when evaluated on non-English data. Due to high data collection costs, it is not realistic to obtain annotated data for each language one desires to support. We propose a method to improve Cross-lingual Question Answering performance without requiring additional annotated data, leveraging Question Generation models to produce synthetic samples in a cross-lingual fashion. We show that the proposed method allows to significantly outperform the baselines trained on English data only, establishing thus a new state-of-the-art on four multilingual datasets: MLQA, XQuAD, SQuAD-it and PIAF (fr).

Findings papers without presentation slot

poster

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience. 
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**

ACL 2023

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.

**Organizers:** Yves Scherrer - University of Helsinki (Finland); Tommi Jauhiainen - University of Helsinki (Finland); Nikola Ljubešić - Jožef Stefan Institute (Slovenia) and University of Zagreb (Croatia); Preslav Nakov - Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (UAE); Jörg Tiedemann - University of Helsinki (Finland); Marcos Zampieri - George Mason University (USA) For more details, please visit our [workshop website](https://sites.google.com/view/vardial-2023?pli=1)

Tenth Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects

workshop paper

### Welcome to the 17th 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 had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. 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.

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

EACL 2023

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.

**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). 



[![](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.

Djamé Seddah

8

14

SHORT BIO

Presentations

Data-Efficient French Language Modeling with CamemBERTa

Analyzing Zero-Shot transfer Scenarios across Spanish variants for Hate Speech Detection

Fine-tuning and Sampling Strategies for Multimodal Role Labeling of Entities under Class Imbalance

Understanding the Impact of UGC Specificities on Translation Quality

Noisy User-Generated Content Translation at the Character Level: Revisiting Open-Vocabulary Capabilities and Robustness of Char-Based Models

Can Character-based Language Models Improve Downstream Task Performances In Low-Resource And Noisy Language Scenarios?

Synthetic Data Augmentation for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Question Answering

Synthetic Data Augmentation for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Question Answering

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES