Predictive models make mistakes and have biases. To combat both, we need to understand their predictions.
Explainable AI (XAI) provides insights into models for vision, language, and tabular data. However, only a few approaches exist for speech classification models. Previous works focus on a selection of spoken language understanding (SLU) tasks, and most users find their explanations challenging to interpret.
We propose a novel approach to explain speech classification models. It provides two types of insights. (i) Word-level. We measure the impact of each audio segment aligned with a word on the outcome. (ii) Paralinguistic. We evaluate how non-linguistic features (e.g., prosody and background noise) affect the outcome if perturbed.
We validate our approach by explaining two state-of-the-art SLU models on two tasks in English and Italian. We test their plausibility with human subject ratings. Our results show that the explanations correctly represent the model's inner workings and are plausible to humans.

Explaining Speech Classification Models via Word-Level Audio Segments and Paralinguistic Features

To achieve better performance and greater fairness in Federated Learning (FL), much of the existing research has centered on individual clients, using domain adaptation techniques and redesigned aggregation schemes to counteract client data heterogeneity. However, an overlooked scenario exists where clients belong to distinctive groups, or, client types, in which groups of clients share similar characteristics such as device specifications or data patterns. Despite being common in group collaborations, this scenario has been overlooked in previous research, potentially leading to performance degradation and systemic biases against certain client types. To bridge this gap, we introduce Federated learning with Group Customization and Reweighting (FedGCR). FedGCR enhances both performance and fairness for FL with Distinct Client Types, consisting of a Federated Group Customization (FedGC) model to provide customization via a novel prompt tuning technique to mitigate the data disparity across different client-types, and a Federated Group Reweighting (FedGR) aggregation scheme to ensure uniform and unbiased performances between clients and between client types by a novel reweighting approach. Extensive experiment comparisons with prior FL methods in domain adaptation and fairness demonstrate the superiority of FedGCR in all metrics, including the overall accuracy and performance uniformity in both the group and the individual level. FedGCR achieves 82.74% accuracy and 12.26(↓) in performance uniformity on the Digit-Five dataset and 81.88% and 14.88%(↓) on DomainNet with a domain imbalance factor of 10, which significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art. Code is available at https://github.com/celinezheng/fedgcr.

FedGCR: Achieving Performance and Fairness for Federated Learning with Distinct Client Types via Group Customization and Reweighting | VIDEO

The use of Natural Language Processing techniques in the legal domain has become established for supporting attorneys and domain experts in content retrieval and decision-making. However, understanding the legal text poses relevant challenges in the recognition of domain-specific entities and the adaptation and explanation of predictive models. This paper addresses the Legal Entity Name Recognition (L-NER) and Court judgment Prediction (CPJ) and Explanation (CJPE) tasks. The L-NER solution explores the use of various transformer-based models, including an entity-aware method attending domain-specific entities. The CJPE proposed method relies on hierarchical BERT-based classifiers combined with local input attribution explainers. We propose a broad comparison of eXplainable AI methodologies along with a novel approach based on NER. For the L-NER task, the experimental results remark on the importance of domain-specific pre-training. For CJP our lightweight solution shows performance in line with existing approaches, and our NER-boosted explanations show promising CJPE results in terms of the conciseness of the prediction explanations.

PoliToHFI at SemEval-2023 Task 6: Leveraging Entity-Aware and Hierarchical Transformers for Legal Entity Recognition and Court Judgment Prediction

As Transformers are increasingly relied upon to solve complex NLP problems, there is an increased need for their decisions to be humanly interpretable. While several explainable AI (XAI) techniques for interpreting the outputs of transformer-based models have been proposed, there is still a lack of easy access to using and comparing them. We introduce ferret, a Python library to simplify the use and comparisons of XAI methods on transformer-based classifiers. With ferret, users can visualize and compare transformers-based models output explanations using state-of-the-art XAI methods on any free-text or existing XAI corpora. Moreover, users can also evaluate ad-hoc XAI metrics to select the most faithful and plausible explanations. To align with the recently consolidated process of sharing and using transformers-based models from Hugging Face, ferret interfaces directly with its Python library. In this paper, we showcase ferret to benchmark XAI methods used on transformers for sentiment analysis and hate speech detection. We show how specific methods provide consistently better explanations and are preferable in the context of transformer models.

ferret: a Framework for Benchmarking Explainers on Transformers

Transformer-based Natural Language Processing models have become the standard for hate speech detection. However, the unconscious use of these techniques for such a critical task comes with negative consequences. Various works have demonstrated that hate speech classifiers are biased. These findings have prompted efforts to explain classifiers, mainly using attribution methods. In this paper, we provide the first benchmark study of interpretability approaches for hate speech detection. We cover four post-hoc token attribution approaches to explain the predictions of Transformer-based misogyny classifiers in English and Italian. Further, we compare generated attributions to attention analysis. We find that only two algorithms provide faithful explanations aligned with human expectations. Gradient-based methods and attention, however, show inconsistent outputs, making their value for explanations questionable for hate speech detection tasks.

Benchmarking Post-Hoc Interpretability Approaches for Transformer-based Misogyny Detection

Interpretability and Model Analysis in NLP

technical paper

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). 

Please register!

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.

Main Track - Machine Learning

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

AAAI 2024

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

To view Day 2 Live Session Recording click [**here**](https://underline.io/events/395/sessions?eventSessionId=15300&searchGroup=lecture) SemEval is a series of international natural language processing (NLP) research workshops whose mission is to advance the current state of the art in semantic analysis and to help create high-quality annotated datasets in a range of increasingly challenging problems in natural language semantics. Each year's workshop features a collection of shared tasks in which computational semantic analysis systems designed by different teams are presented and compared.

SemEval is sponsored by the SIGLEX Special Interest Group on the Lexicon of the Association for Computational Linguistics. For more information on SemEval and its history, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SemEval.
 For more details visit our workshop website: https://semeval.github.io/SemEval2023/
#### [Visit GatherTown](https://app.gather.town/app/5OscLswEEuYf2Psb/ACL2023)

W1: The 17th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval)_Day 1

workshop paper

### 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.

Demo Session 6

demo

### 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

**Organizers:** Tatiana Shavrina, Valentin Malykh, Ekaterina Artemova, Vladislav Mikhailov, Oleg Serikov,
Vitaly Protasov **Description:** The main objectives of this workshop are to (1) create a space for critical reflection on current benchmarks and evaluation
tools, (2) encourage the development of improved or new benchmarks and evaluation tools that resolve current challenges,
(3) develop better approaches to model ranking, (4) rethink benchmarking strategies that best account for computational
costs, energy and ethical considerations, out-of-domain language capabilities and meeting the end-user preferences. We
welcome submissions on ongoing and finished research and hope to provide an opportunity for participants to present
their work and exchange ideas. 
**Please visit our [website](https://nlp-power.github.io/)**

(NLP Power)        NLP Power! The First Workshop on Efficient Benchmarking in NL

# 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). 

Eliana Pastor

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SHORT BIO

Presentations

Explaining Speech Classification Models via Word-Level Audio Segments and Paralinguistic Features

FedGCR: Achieving Performance and Fairness for Federated Learning with Distinct Client Types via Group Customization and Reweighting | VIDEO

PoliToHFI at SemEval-2023 Task 6: Leveraging Entity-Aware and Hierarchical Transformers for Legal Entity Recognition and Court Judgment Prediction

ferret: a Framework for Benchmarking Explainers on Transformers

Benchmarking Post-Hoc Interpretability Approaches for Transformer-based Misogyny Detection

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