Automatic image comprehension is an important yet challenging task that includes identifying actions in an image and corresponding action participants. Most current approaches to this task, now termed \textbf{G}rounded \textbf{S}ituation \textbf{R}ecognition (GSR), start by predicting a verb that describes the action and then predict the nouns that can participate in the action as arguments to the verb. This problem formulation limits each image to a single action even though several actions could be depicted. In contrast, text-based \textbf{S}emantic \textbf{R}ole \textbf{L}abeling (SRL) aims to label all actions in a sentence, typically resulting in at least two or three predicate argument structures per sentence. We hypothesize that expanding GSR to follow the more liberal SRL text-based approach to action and participant identification could improve image comprehension results. To test this hypothesis and to preserve generalization capabilities, we use general-purpose vision and language components as a front-end. This paper presents our results, a substantial 28.6 point jump in performance on the SWiG dataset, which confirm our hypothesis. We also discuss the benefits of loosely coupled broad-coverage off-the-shelf components which generalized well to out of domain images, and can decrease the need for manual image semantic role annotation.

CRAPES:Cross-modal Annotation Projection for Visual Semantic Role Labeling

The task of entity state tracking aims to automatically analyze procedural texts – texts that describe a step-by-step process (e.g. a baking recipe). Specifically, the goal is to track various states of the entities participating in a given process. Some of the challenges for this NLP task include annotated data scarcity and annotators’ reliance on commonsense knowledge to annotate implicit state information. Zhang et al. (2021) successfully incorporated commonsense entity-centric knowledge from ConceptNet into their BERT-based neurosymbolic architecture. Since English mostly encodes state change information in verbs, we attempted to test whether injecting semantic knowledge of events (retrieved from the state-of-the-art Verb-
Net parser) into a neural model can also improve the performance on this task. To achieve this, we adapt the methodology introduced by Zhang et al. (2021) for incorporating symbolic entity information from ConceptNet to the incorporation
of VerbNet event semantics. We evaluate the performance of our model on the
ProPara dataset (Mishra et al., 2018). In addition, we introduce LEXIS, our purely symbolic model for entity state tracking that uses a simple set of case statements, and is informed mostly by linguistic knowledge retrieved from various computational lexical resources. Our approach is inherently domain-agnostic, and our model is explainable and achieves state-of-the-art results on the Recipes dataset (Bosselut
et al., 2017).

Event Semantic Knowledge in Procedural Text Understanding

UMR-Writer is a web-based tool for annotating semantic graphs for the Uniform Meaning Representation (UMR) scheme. UMR is a graph-based semantic representation that can be applied cross-linguistically for deep semantic analysis of text. In this work, we implemented a new keyboard interface for UMR-Writer 2.0, which adds to the original click-based interface to support faster annotation for more experienced annotators. The new interface also addresses some issues with the original click-based interface. Additionally, we demonstrate an efficient workflow for annotation project management in UMR-Writer 2.0, which has been applied to many projects.

UMR-Writer 2.0: Incorporating a New Keyboard Interface and Workflow into UMR-Writer

My Big, Fat 50 Year Journey

Recent advances in NLP have led to a rise in inter-disciplinary and application-oriented research. While this demonstrates the growing real-world impact of the field, research papers frequently feature experiments that do not account for the complexities of realistic data and environments. To explore the extent of this gap, we investigate the relationship between the real-world motivations described in NLP papers and the models and evaluation which comprise the proposed solution. We first survey papers from the NLP Applications track from ACL 2020 and EMNLP 2020, asking which papers have differences between their stated motivation and their experimental setting, and if so, mention them. We find that many papers fall short of considering real-world input and output conditions due to adopting simplified modeling or evaluation settings. As a case study, we then empirically show that the performance of an educational dialog understanding system deteriorates when used in a realistic classroom environment.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/532fnPQGAZvefKDC1fZsuL/embed/polls/13953b18-3bee-4fa9-9c1e-eb6493e620bf" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Mind the Gap between the Application Track and the Real World

Terminology in CL

This talk will discuss symbolic representations of sentences in context, focusing on abstract meaning representations (AMR), examining their capability for capturing certain aspects of meaning. A focus will be how AMR’s can be expanded to encompass figurative language, the recovery of implicit arguments and relations between events. These examples will be in English, and indeed some features of AMR are English-centric. Uniform Meaning Representations, a multi-sentence annotation scheme that is revising AMRs to make them more suitable for other languages, especially low resource languages will be introduced. UMRs include more formal logical scope, number, tense, aspect and modality as well as temporal relations. The talk will conclude with a discussion of ways in which these meaning representations can be enriched even more, by mapping to Wikidata Qnodes or through accessing the rich logical representations present in VerbNet, and thereby provide additional benefit to challenging applications.

Deep Semantics

State-of-the-art models have obtained high accuracy on mainstream Natural Language Inference (NLI) datasets. However, recent research has suggested that the task is far from solved. Current models struggle to generalize and fail to consider the inherent human disagreements in tasks such as NLI. In this work, we conduct an experiment based on a small subset of the NLI corpora such as SNLI and SICK. It reveals that some inference cases are inherently harder to annotate than others, although good-quality guidelines can reduce this difficulty to some extent. We propose adding a Difficulty Score to NLI datasets, to capture the human difficulty level of agreement.

Annotation Difficulties in Natural Language Inference

Transcending Dependencies

Using automatically generated VerbNet semantic representations, we extract events and their participants and predict the changes in existence and location states of entities. The results are evaluated on the ProPara dataset.

Automatic Entity State Annotation using the VerbNet Semantic Parser

Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) have the ability to transform how classroom learning takes place. Combined with the increasing integration of technology in today's classrooms, NLP systems leveraging question answering and dialog processing techniques can serve as private tutors or participants in classroom discussions to increase student engagement and learning. 
To progress towards this goal, we use the classroom discourse framework of academically productive talk (APT) to learn strategies that make for the best learning experience. In this paper, we introduce a new task, called future talk move prediction (FTMP): it consists of predicting the next talk move -- an utterance strategy from APT -- given a conversation history with its corresponding talk moves. We further introduce a neural network model for this task, which outperforms multiple baselines by a large margin. Finally, we compare our model's performance on FTMP to human performance and show several similarities between the two.

What Would a Teacher Do? {P}redicting Future Talk Moves

Biomedical Information Extraction from scientific literature presents two unique and non-trivial challenges.
First, compared with general natural language texts, sentences from scientific papers usually possess wider contexts between knowledge elements. Moreover, comprehending the fine-grained scientific entities and events urgently requires domain-specific background knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel biomedical Information Extraction (IE) model to tackle these two challenges and extract scientific entities and events from English research papers. We perform Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) to compress the wide context to uncover a clear semantic structure for each complex sentence. Besides, we construct the sentence-level knowledge graph from an external knowledge base and use it to enrich the AMR graph to improve the model's understanding of complex scientific concepts. We use an edge-conditioned graph attention network to encode the knowledge-enriched AMR graph for biomedical IE tasks.
Experiments on the GENIA 2011 dataset show that the AMR and external knowledge have contributed 1.8% and 3.0% absolute F-score gains respectively. In order to evaluate the impact of our approach on real-world problems that involve topic-specific fine-grained knowledge elements, we have also created a new ontology and annotated corpus for entity and event extraction for the COVID-19 scientific literature, which can serve as a new benchmark for the biomedical IE community.

Fine-grained Information Extraction from Biomedical Literature based on Knowledge-enriched Abstract Meaning Representation

Much past work has focused on extracting information like events, entities, and relations from documents. Very little work has focused on analyzing these results for better model understanding. In this paper, we introduce a curation interface that takes an Information Extraction (IE) system’s output in a pre-defined format and generates a graphical representation of its elements. The interface supports editing while curating schemas for complex events like Improvised Explosive Device (IED) based scenarios. We identify various schemas that either have linear event chains or contain parallel events with complicated temporal order-ing. We iteratively update an induced schema to uniquely identify events specific to it, add optional events around them, and prune unnecessary events. The resulting schemas are im-proved and enriched versions of the machine-induced versions.

A Graphical Interface for Curating Schemas

To combat COVID-19, both clinicians and scientists need to digest vast amounts of relevant biomedical knowledge in scientific literature to understand the disease mechanism and related biological functions. We have developed a novel and comprehensive knowledge discovery framework, COVID-KG to extract fine-grained multimedia knowledge elements (entities and their visual chemical structures, relations, and events) from the scientific literature. We then exploit the constructed multimedia knowledge graphs (KGs) for question answering and report generation, using drug repurposing as a case study. Our framework also provides detailed contextual sentences, subfigures, and knowledge subgraphs as evidence.


COVID-19 Literature Knowledge Graph Construction and Drug Repurposing Report Generation

### [Program](https://sites.google.com/view/starsem2023/schedule)
To view Day 2 Live Session Recording click [**here**](https://underline.io/events/395/sessions?eventSessionId=15301&searchGroup=lecture) The 12th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (SEM 2023) is organized and sponsored by SIGLEX, the Special Interest Group of the ACL. SEM brings together researchers interested in the semantics of natural languages and its computational modeling. The conference embraces data-driven, neural, and probabilistic approaches, as well as symbolic approaches and everything in between; practical applications as well as theoretical contributions are welcome. The long-term goal of SEM is to provide a stable forum for the growing number of NLP researchers working on all aspects of semantics of (many and diverse!) natural languages. For more details visit our workshop website: https://sites.google.com/view/starsem2023
#### [Visit GatherTown](https://app.gather.town/app/5OscLswEEuYf2Psb/ACL2023)

W2: The 12th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM)_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.

### [Program](https://sigann.github.io/LAW-XVII-2023/program.html/)
Linguistic annotation of natural language corpora is the backbone of supervised methods of statistical natural language processing. The Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW) is the annual workshop of the ACL Special Interest Group on Annotation ([SIGANN](https://sigann.github.io/)), and it provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of innovative research on all aspects of linguistic annotation, including the creation and evaluation of annotation schemes, methods for automatic and manual annotation, use and evaluation of annotation software and frameworks, representation of linguistic data and annotations, semi-supervised “human in the loop” methods of annotation, crowd-sourcing approaches, and more. As in the past, the LAW will provide a forum for annotation researchers to work towards standardization, best practices, and interoperability of annotation information and software. 
For more details visit our workshop website: https://sigann.github.io/LAW-XVII-2023/
#### [Visit GatherTown](https://app.gather.town/app/5OscLswEEuYf2Psb/ACL2023)

W12: The 17th Workshop on Linguistic Annotation (LAW)

Plenary: ACL Lifetime / ToT 

keynote

Theme: Reality Check

technical paper

**Panelists:** Lori Levin, Martha Palmer, Christian Boitet, and Tim Baldwin 


Panel - Terminology in CL

panel

[![](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.

**Title:** Deep Semantics **Chair:** James Pustejovsky **Description:** This talk will discuss symbolic representations of sentences in context, focusing on abstract meaning representations (AMR), examining their capability for capturing certain aspects of meaning. A focus will be how AMR’s can be expanded to encompass figurative language, the recovery of implicit arguments and relations between events. These examples will be in English, and indeed some features of AMR are English-centric. Uniform Meaning Representations, a multi-sentence annotation scheme that is revising AMRs to make them more suitable for other languages, especially low resource languages will be introduced. UMRs include more formal logical scope, number, tense, aspect and modality as well as temporal relations. The talk will conclude with a discussion of ways in which these meaning representations can be enriched even more, by mapping to Wikidata Qnodes or through accessing the rich logical representations present in VerbNet, and thereby provide additional benefit to challenging applications.

Invited talk 1 - Martha Palmer

 **Chairs:** Oto Araújo Vale,	Evandro Ruiz and Tiago Torrent



STIL Main Conference Session F: Evaluation

**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

**Chair:** Tiago Timponi Torrent 
**Presenter:** [Martha Palmer](https://underline.io/speakers/52366-martha-palmer) 
**Title:** Transcending Dependencies 
**Abstract:** This talk will discuss symbolic representations of sentences in context, ranging from universal dependencies to abstract meaning representations (AMR), and examine their capability for capturing certain aspects of meaning. A main focus will be the ways in which AMR’s can be expanded to encompass figurative language, the recovery of implicit arguments and relations between events. These examples will be primarily in English, and indeed some features of AMR are fairly English-centric. The talk will conclude by introducing Uniform Meaning Representations, a multi-sentence annotation scheme that is revising AMR’s to make them more suitable for other languages, especially low resource languages, and expanding the annotation guidelines to include Number, Tense, Aspect and Modality as well as Temporal Relations.

Plenary Talk Martha Palmer (UC – Boulder)

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

W2: LAW-DMR: The 15th Linguistic Annotation & 3rd Designing Meaning Representations Joint Workshop

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.

Findings Papers - NLP Applications

**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).

Poster 3S: Information Extraction

poster

Demo Session 2

demo

12F-Oral: System Demonstrations

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>

Martha Palmer

27

57

SHORT BIO

Presentations