United States

The framing of political issues can influence policy and public opinion. Even though the public plays a key role in creating and spreading frames, little is known about how ordinary people on social media frame political issues. By creating a new dataset of immigration-related tweets labeled for multiple framing typologies from political communication theory, we develop supervised models to detect frames. We demonstrate how users&#39; ideology and region impact framing choices, and how a message&#39;s framing influences audience responses. We find that the more commonly-used issue-generic frames obscure important ideological and regional patterns that are only revealed by immigration-specific frames. Furthermore, frames oriented towards human interests, culture, and politics are associated with higher user engagement. This large-scale analysis of a complex social and linguistic phenomenon contributes to both NLP and social science research.

NAACL 2021

Modeling Framing in Immigration Discourse on Social Media

### Welcome to the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) <br><br>
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.<br><br><br><br>

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EACL 2023

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.

The framing of political issues can influence policy and public opinion. Even though the public plays a key role in creating and spreading frames, little is known about how ordinary people on social media frame political issues. By creating a new dataset of immigration-related tweets labeled for multiple framing typologies from political communication theory, we develop supervised models to detect frames. We demonstrate how users' ideology and region impact framing choices, and how a message's framing influences audience responses. We find that the more commonly-used issue-generic frames obscure important ideological and regional patterns that are only revealed by immigration-specific frames. Furthermore, frames oriented towards human interests, culture, and politics are associated with higher user engagement. This large-scale analysis of a complex social and linguistic phenomenon contributes to both NLP and social science research.

technical paper

2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

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Recent studies have revealed a security threat to natural language processing (NLP) models, called the Backdoor Attack. Victim models can maintain competitive performance on clean samples while behaving abnormally on samples with a specific trigger word inserted. Previous backdoor attacking methods usually assume that attackers have a certain degree of data knowledge, either the dataset which users would use or proxy datasets for a similar task, for implementing the data poisoning procedure. However, in this paper, we find that it is possible to hack the model in a data-free way by modifying one single word embedding vector, with almost no accuracy sacrificed on clean samples. Experimental results on sentiment analysis and sentence-pair classification tasks show that our method is more efficient and stealthier. We hope this work can raise the awareness of such a critical security risk hidden in the embedding layers of NLP models. Our code is available at https://github.com/ lancopku/Embedding-Poisoning.

Be Careful about Poisoned Word Embeddings: Exploring the Vulnerability of the Embedding Layers in NLP Models

Conditional Random Field (CRF) based neural models are among the most performant meth- ods for solving sequence labeling problems. Despite its great success, CRF has the short- coming of occasionally generating illegal se- quences of tags, e.g. sequences containing an

Masked Conditional Random Fields for Sequence Labeling

**Read the paper on the folowing link:**

https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2021.naacl-main.166/

**Abstract:**

0

DA-Transformer: Distance-aware Transformer

We annotate 17,000 SNS posts with both the writer’s subjective emotional intensity and the reader’s objective one to construct a Japanese emotion analysis dataset. In this study, we explore the difference between the emotional intensity of the writer and that of the readers with this dataset. We found that the reader cannot fully detect the emotions of the writer, especially anger and trust. In addition, experimental results in estimating the emotional intensity show that it is more difficult to estimate the writer’s subjective labels than the readers’. The large gap between the subjective and objective emotions implies the complexity of the mapping from a post to the subjective emotional intensities, which also leads to a lower performance with machine learning models.

WRIME: A New Dataset for Emotional Intensity Estimation with Subjective and Objective Annotations

Text style transfer aims to controllably generate text with targeted stylistic changes while maintaining core meaning from the source sentence constant. Many of the existing style transfer benchmarks primarily focus on individual high-level semantic changes (e.g. positive to negative), which enable controllability at a high level but do not offer fine-grained control involving sentence structure, emphasis, and content of the sentence. In this paper, we introduce a large-scale benchmark, StylePTB, with (1) paired sentences undergoing 21 fine-grained stylistic changes spanning atomic lexical, syntactic, semantic, and thematic transfers of text, as well as (2) compositions of multiple transfers which allow modeling of fine-grained stylistic changes as building blocks for more complex, high-level transfers. By benchmarking existing methods on StylePTB, we find that they struggle to model fine-grained changes and have an even more difficult time composing multiple styles. As a result, StylePTB brings novel challenges that we hope will encourage future research in controllable text style transfer, compositional models, and learning disentangled representations. Solving these challenges would present important steps towards controllable text generation.

StylePTB: A Compositional Benchmark for Fine-grained Controllable Text Style Transfer

Cant is important for understanding advertising, comedies and dog-whistle politics. However, computational research on cant is hindered by a lack of available datasets. In this paper, we propose a large and diverse Chinese dataset for creating and understanding cant from a computational linguistics perspective. We formulate a task for cant understanding and provide both quantitative and qualitative analysis for tested word embedding similarity and pretrained language models. Experiments suggest that such a task requires deep language understanding, common sense, and world knowledge and thus can be a good testbed for pretrained language models and help models perform better on other tasks.

Blow the Dog Whistle: A Chinese Dataset for Cant Understanding with Common Sense and World Knowledge

In the automatic evaluation of generative question answering (GenQA) systems, it is difficult to assess the correctness of generated answers due to the free-form of the answer. Especially, widely used n-gram similarity metrics often fail to discriminate the incorrect answers since they equally consider all of the tokens. To alleviate this problem, we propose KPQA-metric, a new metric for evaluating the correctness of GenQA. Specifically, our new metric assigns different weights to each token via keyphrase prediction, thereby judging whether a generated answer sentence captures the key meaning of the reference answer. To evaluate our metric, we create high-quality human judgments of correctness on two GenQA datasets. Using our human-evaluation datasets, we show that our proposed metric has a significantly higher correlation with human judgments than existing metrics.

KPQA: A Metric for Generative Question Answering Using Keyphrase Weights

The current COVID-19 pandemic has lead to the creation of many corpora that facilitate NLP research and downstream applications to help fight the pandemic. However, most of these corpora are exclusively for English. As the pandemic is a global problem, it is worth creating COVID-19 related datasets for languages other than English. In this paper, we present the first manually-annotated COVID-19 domain-specific dataset for Vietnamese. Particularly, our dataset is annotated for the named entity recognition (NER) task with newly-defined entity types that can be used in other future epidemics. Our dataset also contains the largest number of entities compared to existing Vietnamese NER datasets. We empirically conduct experiments using strong baselines on our dataset, and find that: automatic Vietnamese word segmentation helps improve the NER results and the highest performances are obtained by fine-tuning pre-trained language models where the monolingual model PhoBERT for Vietnamese produces higher results than the multilingual model XLM-R. We publicly release our dataset at: https://github.com/VinAIResearch/PhoNER_COVID19

COVID-19 Named Entity Recognition for Vietnamese

New words are regularly introduced to communities, yet not all of these words persist in a community's lexicon. Among the many factors contributing to lexical change, we focus on the understudied effect of social networks. We conduct a large-scale analysis of over 80k neologisms in 4420 online communities across a decade. Using Poisson regression and survival analysis, our study demonstrates that the community's network structure plays a significant role in lexical change. Apart from overall size, properties including dense connections, the lack of local clusters and more external contacts promote lexical innovation and retention. Unlike offline communities, these topic-based communities do not experience strong lexical levelling despite increased contact but accommodate more niche words. Our work provides support for the sociolinguistic hypothesis that lexical change is partially shaped by the structure of the underlying network but also uncovers findings specific to online communities.

The structure of online social networks modulates the rate of lexical change

Understanding how news media frame political issues is important due to its impact on public attitudes, yet hard to automate. Computational approaches have largely focused on classifying the frame of a full news article while framing signals are often subtle and local. Furthermore, automatic news analysis is a sensitive domain, and existing classifiers lack transparency in their predictions. This paper addresses both issues with a novel semi-supervised model, which jointly learns to embed local information about the events and related actors in a news article through an auto-encoding framework, and to leverage this signal for document-level frame classification. Our experiments show that: our model outperforms previous models of frame prediction; we can further improve performance with unlabeled training data leveraging the semi-supervised nature of our model; and the learnt event and actor embeddings intuitively corroborate the document-level predictions, providing a nuanced and interpretable article frame representation.

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