Answering time-sensitive questions from long documents requires temporal reasoning over the times in questions and documents. An important open question is whether large language models can perform such reasoning solely using a provided text document, or whether they can benefit from additional temporal information extracted using other systems. We address this research question by applying existing temporal information extraction systems to construct temporal graphs of events, times, and temporal relations in questions and documents. We then investigate different approaches for fusing these graphs into Transformer models. Experimental results show that our proposed approach for fusing temporal graphs into input text substantially enhances the temporal reasoning capabilities of Transformer models with or without fine-tuning. Additionally, our proposed method outperforms various graph convolution-based approaches and establishes a new state-of-the-art performance on SituatedQA and three splits of TimeQA.

Fusing Temporal Graphs into Transformers for Time-Sensitive Question Answering

Consumers of services and products exhibit a wide range of behaviors on social networks when they are dissatisfied. In this paper, we consider three types of cynical expressions -- negative feelings, specific reasons, and attitude of being right -- and annotate a corpus of 3189 comments in Spanish on car analysis channels from YouTube. We evaluate both token classification and text classification settings for this problem, and compare performance of different pre-trained models including BETO, SpanBERTa, Multilingual Bert, and RoBERTuito. The results show that models achieve performance above 0.8 F1 for all types of cynical expressions in the text classification setting, but achieve lower performance (around 0.6-0.7 F1) for the harder token classification setting.

Transformer-based cynical expression detection in a corpus of Spanish YouTube reviews

We explore temporal dependency graph (TDG) parsing in the clinical domain. We leverage existing annotations on the THYME dataset to semi-automatically construct a TDG corpus. Then we propose a new natural language inference (NLI) approach to TDG parsing, and evaluate it both on general domain TDGs from wikinews and the newly constructed clinical TDG corpus. We achieve competitive performance on general domain TDGs with a much simpler model than prior work. On the clinical TDGs, our method establishes the first result of TDG parsing on clinical data with 0.79/0.88 micro/macro F1.

Textual Entailment for Temporal Dependency Graph Parsing

The bias-variance tradeoff is the idea that learning methods need to balance model complexity with data size to minimize both under-fitting and over-fitting. Recent empirical work and theoretical analysis with over-parameterized neural networks challenges the classic bias-variance trade-off notion suggesting that no such trade-off holds: as the width of the network grows, bias monotonically decreases while variance initially increases followed by a decrease. In this work, we first provide a variance decomposition-based justification criteria to examine whether large pretrained neural models in a fine-tuning setting are generalizable enough to have low bias and variance. We then perform theoretical and empirical analysis using ensemble methods explicitly designed to decrease variance due to optimization. This results in essentially a two-stage fine-tuning algorithm that first ratchets down bias and variance iteratively, and then uses a selected fixed-bias model to further reduce variance due to optimization by ensembling. We also analyze the nature of variance change with the ensemble size in low- and high-resource classes. Empirical results show that this two-stage method obtains strong results on SuperGLUE tasks and clinical information extraction tasks. Code and settings are available: https://github.com/christa60/bias-var-fine-tuning-plms.git

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/t38CPUax2NoHBQcXN6okdA/embed/polls/549fa3a8-7ef7-44ac-aab4-4028a2644c7d" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Two-Stage Fine-Tuning for Improved Bias and Variance for Large Pretrained Language Models

Pretrained transformer-based language models achieve state-of-the-art performance in many NLP tasks, but it is an open question whether the knowledge acquired by the models during pretraining resembles the linguistic knowledge of humans. We present both humans and pretrained transformers with descriptions of events, and measure their preference for telic interpretations (the event has a natural endpoint) or atelic interpretations (the event does not have a natural endpoint). To measure these preferences and determine what factors influence them, we design an English test and a novel-word test that include a variety of linguistic cues (noun phrase quantity, resultative structure, contextual information, temporal units) that bias toward certain interpretations. We find that humans’ choice of telicity interpretation is reliably influenced by theoretically-motivated cues, transformer models (BERT and RoBERTa) are influenced by some (though not all) of the cues, and transformer models often rely more heavily on temporal units than humans do.

Do pretrained transformers infer telicity like humans?

This paper describes our systems for negation detection and time expression recognition in SemEval 2021 Task 10, Source-Free Domain Adaptation for Semantic Processing. We show that self-training, active learning and data augmentation techniques can improve the generalization ability of the model on the unlabeled target domain data without accessing source domain data. We also perform detailed ablation studies and error analyses for our time expression recognition systems to identify the source of the performance improvement and give constructive feedback on the temporal normalization annotation guidelines.

The University of Arizona at SemEval-2021 Task 10: Applying Self-training, Active Learning and Data Augmentation to Source-free Domain Adaptation

Multi-hop reasoning requires aggregation and inference from multiple facts. To retrieve such facts, we propose a simple approach that retrieves and reranks set of evidence facts jointly. Our approach first generates unsuper- vised clusters of sentences as candidate evi- dence by accounting links between sentences and coverage with the given query. Then, a RoBERTa-based reranker is trained to bring the most representative evidence cluster to the top. We specifically emphasize on the impor- tance of retrieving evidence jointly by showing several comparative analyses to other meth- ods that retrieve and rerank evidence sen- tences individually. First, we introduce sev- eral attention- and embedding-based analy- ses, which indicate that jointly retrieving and reranking approaches can learn compositional knowledge required for multi-hop reasoning. Second, our experiments show that jointly re- trieving candidate evidence leads to substan- tially higher evidence retrieval performance when fed to the same supervised reranker. In particular, our joint retrieval and then rerank- ing approach achieves new state-of-the-art evi- dence retrieval performance on two multi-hop question answering (QA) datasets: 30.5 Re- call@2 on QASC, and 67.6% F1 on MultiRC. When the evidence text from our joint retrieval approach is fed to a RoBERTa-based answer selection classifier, we achieve new state-of- the-art QA performance on MultiRC and sec- ond best result on QASC.

If You Want to Go Far Go Together: Unsupervised Joint Candidate Evidence Retrieval for Multi-hop Question Answering

Many state-of-the-art (SOTA) language models

Explainable Multi-hop Verbal Reasoning Through Internal Monologue

However, geographical locations occur not only as individual toponyms, but also as compositions of reference geolocations joined and modified by connectives, e.g., "between the towns of Adrano and S.Maria di Licodia, 32 kilometres northwest of Catania". Ideally, a geoparser should be able to take such text, and the geographical shapes of the toponyms referenced within it, and parse these into a geographical shape, formed by a set of coordinates, that represents the location described. But creating a dataset for this complex geoparsing task is difficult and, if done manually, would require a huge amount of effort to annotate the geographical shapes of not only the geolocation described but also the reference toponyms. We present an approach that automates most of the process by combining Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap. As a result, we have gathered a collection of 360,187 uncurated complex geolocation descriptions, from which we have manually curated 1,000 examples intended to be used as a test set. To accompany the data, we define a new geoparsing evaluation framework along with a scoring methodology and a set of baselines.

A Dataset and Evaluation Framework for Complex Geographical Description Parsi

**Are you attending this poster session virtually?** 
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PS2 (GatherTown) Posters, Demo, Industry, Findings

poster

**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.

### [Program](https://wassa-workshop.github.io/2023/schedule/)
Subjectivity and Sentiment Analysis has become a highly developed research area, ranging from binary classification of reviews to the detection of complex emotion structures between entities found in text. This field has expanded both on a practical level, finding numerous successful applications in business, as well as on a theoretical level, allowing researchers to explore more complex research questions related to affective computing. Its continuing importance is also shown by the interest it generates in other disciplines such as Economics, Sociology, Psychology, Marketing, Crisis Management & Digital Humanities. For more details visit our workshop website: https://wassa-workshop.github.io/
#### [Visit GatherTown](https://app.gather.town/app/5OscLswEEuYf2Psb/ACL2023)

W16: The 13th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment & Social Media Analysis (WASSA)

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.

For more details visit our workshop website: https://clinical-nlp.github.io/2023/
#### [Visit GatherTown](https://app.gather.town/app/5OscLswEEuYf2Psb/ACL2023)

W17: The 5th Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop (Clinical NLP)

Poster Session 4

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

W22: CoNLL 2021 Day 1

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.

SemEval-2021, 15th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluations

**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).

**Session Chair: ** Marek Rei

13B-Oral: Question Answering

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>

NAACL 2021

**Session Chair: ** Bhuwan Dhingra

4B-Oral: Question Answering

POSTER4: Applications: Legal, financial, business, humanities

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

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 and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

Steven Bethard

9

2

SHORT BIO

Presentations

Fusing Temporal Graphs into Transformers for Time-Sensitive Question Answering

Transformer-based cynical expression detection in a corpus of Spanish YouTube reviews

Textual Entailment for Temporal Dependency Graph Parsing

Two-Stage Fine-Tuning for Improved Bias and Variance for Large Pretrained Language Models

Do pretrained transformers infer telicity like humans?

The University of Arizona at SemEval-2021 Task 10: Applying Self-training, Active Learning and Data Augmentation to Source-free Domain Adaptation

If You Want to Go Far Go Together: Unsupervised Joint Candidate Evidence Retrieval for Multi-hop Question Answering

Explainable Multi-hop Verbal Reasoning Through Internal Monologue

A Dataset and Evaluation Framework for Complex Geographical Description Parsi

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