This paper presents the shared task on Multilingual Idiomaticity Detection and Sentence Embedding, which consists of two subtasks: (a) a binary classification task aimed at identifying whether a sentence contains an idiomatic expression, and (b) a task based on semantic text similarity which requires the model to adequately represent potentially idiomatic expressions in context. Each subtask includes different settings regarding the amount of training data. Besides the task description, this paper introduces the datasets in English, Portuguese, and Galician and their annotation procedure, the evaluation metrics, and a summary of the participant systems and their results. The task had close to 100 registered participants organised into twenty five teams making over 650 and 150 submissions in the practice and evaluation phases respectively.

SemEval-2022 Task 2: Multilingual Idiomaticity Detection and Sentence Embedding

Article prediction is a task that has long defied accurate linguistic description. As such, this task is ideally suited to evaluate models on their ability to emulate native-speaker intuition. To this end, we compare the performance of native English speakers and pre-trained models on the task of article prediction set up as a three way choice (a/an, the, zero). Our experiments with BERT show that BERT outperforms humans on this task across all articles. In particular, BERT is far superior to humans at detecting the zero article, possibly because we insert them using rules that the deep neural model can easily pick up. More interestingly, we find that BERT tends to agree more with annotators than with the corpus when inter-annotator agreement is high but switches to agreeing more with the corpus as inter-annotator agreement drops. We contend that this alignment with annotators, despite being trained on the corpus, suggests that BERT is not memorising article use, but captures a high level generalisation of article use akin to human intuition.


Abstraction not Memory: BERT and the English Article System

Despite their success in a variety of NLP tasks, pre-trained language models, due to their heavy reliance on compositionality, fail in effectively capturing the meanings of multiword expressions (MWEs), especially idioms. Therefore, datasets and methods to improve the representation of MWEs are urgently needed. Existing datasets are limited to providing the degree of idiomaticity of expressions along with the literal and, where applicable, (a single) non-literal interpretation of MWEs. This work presents a novel dataset of naturally occurring sentences containing MWEs manually classified into a fine-grained set of meanings, spanning both English and Portuguese. We use this dataset in two tasks designed to test i) a language model's ability to detect idiom usage, and ii) the effectiveness of a language model in generating representations of sentences containing idioms. Our experiments demonstrate that, on the task of detecting idiomatic usage, these models perform reasonably well in the one-shot and few-shot scenarios, but that there is significant scope for improvement in the zero-shot scenario. On the task of representing idiomaticity, we find that pre-training is not always effective, while fine-tuning could provide a sample efficient method of learning representations of sentences containing MWEs.

AStitchInLanguageModels: Dataset and Methods for the Exploration of Idiomaticity in Pre-Trained Language Models

This paper measures the impact of increased exposure on whether learned construction grammars converge onto shared representations when trained on data from different registers. Register influences the frequency of constructions, with some structures common in formal but not informal usage. We expect that a grammar induction algorithm exposed to different registers will acquire different constructions. To what degree does increased exposure lead to the convergence of register-specific grammars? The experiments in this paper simulate language learning in 12 languages (half Germanic and half Romance) with corpora representing three registers (Twitter, Wikipedia, Web). These simulations are repeated with increasing amounts of exposure, from 100k to 2 million words, to measure the impact of exposure on the convergence of grammars. The results show that increased exposure does lead to converging grammars across all languages. In addition, a shared core of register-universal constructions remains constant across increasing amounts of exposure.

Learned Construction Grammars Converge Across Registers Given Increased Exposure

Despite their success in a variety of NLP tasks, pre-trained language models, due to their heavy reliance on compositionality, fail in effectively capturing the meanings of multiword expressions (MWEs), especially idioms. Therefore, datasets and methods to improve the representation of MWEs are urgently needed. Existing datasets are limited to providing the degree of idiomaticity of expressions along with the literal and, where applicable, (a single) non-literal interpretation of MWEs. This work presents a novel dataset of naturally occurring sentences containing MWEs manually classified into a fine-grained set of meanings, spanning both English and Portuguese. We use this dataset in two tasks designed to test i) a language model’s ability to detect idiom usage, and ii) the effectiveness of a language model in generating representations of sentences containing idioms. Our experiments demonstrate that, on the task of detecting idiomatic usage, these models perform reasonably well in the one-shot and few-shot scenarios, but that there is significant scope for improvement in the zero-shot scenario. On the task of representing idiomaticity, we find that pre-training is not always effective, while fine-tuning could provide a sample efficient method of learning representations of sentences containing MWEs.

Toxicity is pervasive in social media and poses a major threat to the health of online communities. The recent introduction of pre-trained language models, which have achieved state-of-the-art results in many NLP tasks, has transformed the way in which we approach natural language processing. However, the inherent nature of pre-training means that they are unlikely to capture task-specific statistical information or learn domain-specific knowledge. Additionally, most implementations of these models typically do not employ conditional random fields, a method for simultaneous token classification. We show that these modifications can improve model performance on the Toxic Spans Detection task at SemEval-2021 to achieve a score within 4 percentage points of the top performing team.

UoB at SemEval-2021 Task 5: Extending Pre-Trained Language Models to Include Task and Domain-Specific Information for Toxic Span Prediction

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W25: SemEval-2022: 15th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

workshop paper

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
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, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 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 and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
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[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

NAACL 2022

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

**Tracks:** 
* Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP
* Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics
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Virtual PS1 - 3G: Group 8

poster



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W5: Evaluation & Comparison of NLP Systems (Eval4NLP)

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.

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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.


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W22: CoNLL 2021 Day 1

Findings Papers - Resources and Evaluation

technical paper

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).

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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).

Harish Tayyar Madabushi

6

1

SHORT BIO

Presentations

SemEval-2022 Task 2: Multilingual Idiomaticity Detection and Sentence Embedding

Abstraction not Memory: BERT and the English Article System

AStitchInLanguageModels: Dataset and Methods for the Exploration of Idiomaticity in Pre-Trained Language Models

Learned Construction Grammars Converge Across Registers Given Increased Exposure

AStitchInLanguageModels: Dataset and Methods for the Exploration of Idiomaticity in Pre-Trained Language Models

UoB at SemEval-2021 Task 5: Extending Pre-Trained Language Models to Include Task and Domain-Specific Information for Toxic Span Prediction

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