The dramatic increase in the use of social media platforms for information sharing has also fueled a steep growth in online abuse. A simple yet effective way of abusing individuals or communities is by creating memes, which often integrate an image with a short piece of text layered on top of it. Such harmful elements are in rampant use and are a threat to online safety. Hence it is necessary to develop efficient models to detect and flag abusive memes. The problem becomes more challenging in a low-resource setting (e.g., Bengali memes, i.e., images with Bengali text embedded on it) because of the absence of benchmark datasets on which AI models could be trained. In this paper we bridge this gap by building a Bengali meme dataset. To setup an effective benchmark we implement several baseline models for classifying abusive memes using this dataset. We observe that multimodal models that use both textual and visual information outperform unimodal models. Our best-performing model achieves a macro F1 score of 70.51. Finally, we perform a qualitative error analysis of the misclassified memes of the best-performing text-based, image-based and multimodal models.

BanglaAbuseMeme: A Dataset for Bengali Abusive Meme Classification

The proliferation of online hate speech has necessitated the creation of algorithms which can detect toxicity. Most of the past research focuses on this detection as a classification task, but assigning an absolute toxicity label is often tricky. Hence, few of the past works transform the same task into a regression. This paper shows the comparative evaluation of different transformers and traditional machine learning
models on a recently released toxicity severity measurement dataset by Jigsaw. We further demonstrate the issues with the model predictions using explainability analysis

Which one is more toxic? Findings from Jigsaw Rate Severity of Toxic Comments

Social media platforms often act as breeding grounds for various forms of trolling or malicious content targeting users or communities. One way of trolling users is by creating memes, which in most cases unites an image with a short piece of text embedded on top of it. The situation is more complex for multilingual(e.g., Tamil) memes due to the lack of benchmark datasets and models. We explore several models to detect Troll memes in Tamil based on the shared task, "Troll Meme Classification in DravidianLangTech2022" at ACL-2022. We observe while the text-based model MURIL performs better for Non-troll meme classification, the image-based model VGG16 performs better for Troll-meme classification. Further fusing these two modalities help us achieve stable outcomes in both classes. Our fusion model achieved a 0.561 weighted average F1 score and ranked second in this task.

Ensembling Multi-Modalities for Tamil TrollMeme Classification

With the rise of online abuse, the NLP community has begun investigating the use of neural architectures to generate counterspeech that can "counter" the vicious tone of such abusive speech and dilute/ameliorate their rippling effect over the social network. However, most of the efforts so far have been primarily focused on English. To bridge the gap for low-resource languages such as Bengali and Hindi, we create a benchmark dataset of 5,062 abusive speech/counterspeech pairs, of which 2,460 pairs are in Bengali, and 2,602 pairs are in Hindi. We implement several baseline models considering various interlingual transfer mechanisms with different configurations to generate suitable counterspeech to set up an effective benchmark. We observe that the monolingual setup yields the best performance. Further, using synthetic transfer, language models can generate counterspeech to some extent; specifically, we notice that transferability is better when languages belong to the same language family.

Low-Resource Counterspeech Generation for Indic Languages: The Case of Bengali and Hindi

Resources and Evaluation 1

technical paper

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

To access the **EMNLP 2023** event page on Underline, you need to register for the Conference. 
Please follow **[this link](https://2023.emnlp.org/registration/)** for more details.

EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

Click on the Live Session Recording to view the session 
[Live Session Recording Part 1](https://us06web.zoom.us/rec/share/Z4xEmbbPsXx6eJgKSMJkOnBRIhJSmJFeLALAW1y-dYcRRx2HOQFmpeD1fmGrT2D4.1AgCmC4RbhZi3eID?startTime=1665962332000) [Live Session Recording Part 2](https://us06web.zoom.us/rec/share/Z4xEmbbPsXx6eJgKSMJkOnBRIhJSmJFeLALAW1y-dYcRRx2HOQFmpeD1fmGrT2D4.1AgCmC4RbhZi3eID?startTime=1665990851000)
 
**Workshop overview:** As in the earlier editions, TRAC will focus on the applications of NLP, ML and pragmatic studies on aggression and impoliteness to tackle these issues. We invite long (8 pages) and short papers (4 pages) as well as position papers and opinion pieces (5 - 20 pages) based on, but not limited to, any of the following themes from academic researchers, industry and any other group / team working in the area. 

* Theories and models of aggression and conflict in language. 

* Cyberbullying, threatening, hateful, aggressive and abusive language on the web.

* Multilingualism and aggression.

* Resource Development - Corpora, Annotation Guidelines and Best Practices for threat and aggression detection.

* Computational Models and Methods for aggression, hate speech and offensive language detection in text and speech.

Detection of threats and bullying on the web.

Automatic censorship and moderation: ethical, legal and technological issues and challenges. [**Read more.**](https://sites.google.com/view/trac2022/) Our detailed schedule can be viewed [**here.**](https://sites.google.com/view/trac2022/schedule)

W12 Third Workshop on Threat, Aggression and Cyberbullying (TRAC-2022)

workshop paper

[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/81a3c0317d24f663b49b996875024d45.png)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2022.coling-1/)



### THE CONFERENCE WE KNOW AND WE WANT.
**COLING**, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes but also in industrial research departments including tech-startups. COLING provides opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting discovery.

In fall of 2022, COLING will be held in Gyeongju in a hybrid format. All participants can either present at the venue site or join virtually. As more people get vaccinated, we are happy to provide safer environments for our colleagues. We believe that COLING 2022 will be one of the conferences, free from the pandemic. The hybrid format gives presenters and sponsors a valuable opportunity to promote their companies in both an online and in-person venue. For the first time in a long time, customers can interact with their sponsor's products first-hand. The online venue, too, gives sponsors the chance to network with those unable to attend the in-person session.

The hybrid format ultimately lends itself to greater exposure for our sponsors: COLING2022 will let you reach more potential partners and customers than ever before!

To gain access to this event page you are required to register. Find more information and pay the registration fee on event the organizer’s website **[https://coling2022.org/reg](https://coling2022.org/reg)**

COLING 2022

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

**Organizers:** Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi, Ruba Priyadharshini, Anand Kumar M, Parameswari
Krishnamurthy, Elizabeth Sherly, Sinnathamby Mahesan
 **Description:** The development of technology increases our internet use, and most of the global languages have adapted themselves
to the digital era. However, there are many regional, under-resourced languages that face challenges as they still lack
developments in language technology [1]. One such language family is the Dravidian family of languages. Dravidian
languages are primarily spoken in south India and Sri Lanka. Pockets of speakers are found in Nepal, Pakistan, Malaysia,
other parts of India and elsewhere in the world. The Dravidian languages, which are 4,500 years old [2] and spoken by
millions of speakers, are under-resourced in speech and natural language processing [1]. The Dravidian languages are
divided into four groups: South, South-Central, Central, and North groups. Dravidian morphology is agglutinating and
exclusively suffixal. Syntactically, Dravidian languages are head-final and left-branching. They are free-constituent order
languages. To improve access to and production of information for monolingual speakers of Dravidian languages, it is
necessary to have speech and languages technologies. The aim of these workshops is to save the Dravidian languages
from extinction in technology. This is the first workshop on speech and language technologies for Dravidian languages.
 
**Please visit our [website](https://dravidianlangtech.github.io/2022/)**

(Dravidian LangTech) The Second Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for DravidianLanguages

# 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). 

poster

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.

MITHUN DAS

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SHORT BIO

Presentations

BanglaAbuseMeme: A Dataset for Bengali Abusive Meme Classification

Which one is more toxic? Findings from Jigsaw Rate Severity of Toxic Comments

Ensembling Multi-Modalities for Tamil TrollMeme Classification

Low-Resource Counterspeech Generation for Indic Languages: The Case of Bengali and Hindi

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PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES