Dominican Republic

Dependency parse trees are helpful for discovering the opinion words in aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA). However, the trees obtained from off-the-shelf dependency parsers are static, and could be sub-optimal in ABSA. This is because the syntactic trees are not designed for capturing the interactions between opinion words and aspect words. In this work, we aim to shorten the distance between aspects and corresponding opinion words by learning an aspect-centric tree structure. The aspect and opinion words are expected to be closer along such tree structure compared to the standard dependency parse tree. The learning process allows the tree structure to adaptively correlate the aspect and opinion words, enabling us to better identify the polarity in the ABSA task. We conduct experiments on five aspect-based sentiment datasets, and the proposed model significantly outperforms recent strong baselines. Furthermore, our thorough analysis demonstrates the average distance between aspect and opinion words are shortened by at least 19% on the standard SemEval Restaurant14 dataset.

EMNLP 2021

To be Closer: Learning to Link up Aspects with Opinions

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
The opportunity to present at NAACL should not depend on a researcher’s travel budget, or their family status. This is why it is so important to make virtual participation at NAACL as good an experience as possible – but we want to also provide a good experience for in-person participants. As a community, we are still working out the best way to do that. This year at NAACL, we are trying out a big virtual poster session ahead of the conference, with the hope that this will make make for a lively and interactive experience. At the same time, we are reducing virtual oral presentations, which seem to be particularly tricky to make to work well. A big thanks to the NAACL program chairs and to Luciana Benotti for all their ideas and work to improve the virtual experience. And participants, virtual as well as in-person: Please let us know what worked for you and what didn’t, so we can continue to improve hybrid conferences. 
 
I have been lucky to work with many amazing people. Without their insight, dedication and patience, and without the many hours of work they put in, NAACL would not have been possible. A huge thank you to the program chairs Helena Gomez, Kevin Duh, and Steve Bethard – you are the best! 
 
Finally, I would like to thank all authors, invited speakers and panelists, area chairs and reviewers, the volunteers organizing and chairing sessions, and all attendees, in-person and virtual. Thank you for helping us make NAACL 2024 come to life. 
 
Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
*You can read the full Welcome message in the [Conference Handbook (downloadable)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H1NvW0VASQjkSCYgw3mr-3l4yYDSxz6B/view?usp=sharing)*

To access the event page you need to register [**here.**](http://acl.swoogo.com/naacl2024) 
Your access to the event page is limited based on your registration type. If you registered for workshops only, you will gain access to full workshops content on the day of the workshops program.

Please register!

NAACL 2024

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

poster

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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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 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

As an essential form of knowledge representation, taxonomies are widely used in various downstream natural language processing tasks. However, with the continuously rising of new concepts, many existing taxonomies are unable to maintain coverage by manual expansion. In this paper, we propose TEMP, a self-supervised taxonomy expansion method, which predicts the position of new concepts by ranking the generated taxonomy-paths. For the first time, TEMP employs pre-trained contextual encoders in taxonomy construction and hypernym detection problems. Experiments prove that pre-trained contextual embeddings are able to capture hypernym-hyponym relations. To learn more detailed differences between taxonomy-paths, we train the model with dynamic margin loss by a novel dynamic margin function. Extensive evaluations exhibit that TEMP outperforms prior state-of-the-art taxonomy expansion approaches by 14.3% in accuracy and 15.8% in mean reciprocal rank on three public benchmarks.

TEMP: Taxonomy Expansion with Dynamic Margin Loss through Taxonomy-Paths

Recent works have shown that powerful pretrained language models (PLM) can be fooled by small perturbations or intentional attacks. To solve this issue, various data augmentation techniques are proposed to improve the robustness of PLMs. However, it is still challenging to augment semantically relevant examples with sufficient diversity. In this work, we present Virtual Data Augmentation (VDA), a general framework for robustly fine-tuning PLMs. Based on the original token embeddings, we construct a multinomial mixture for augmenting virtual data embeddings, where a masked language model guarantees the semantic relevance and the Gaussian noise provides the augmentation diversity. Furthermore, a regularized training strategy is proposed to balance the two aspects. Extensive experiments on six datasets show that our approach is able to improve the robustness of PLMs and alleviate the performance degradation under adversarial attacks. Our codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/VDA.

Virtual Data Augmentation: A Robust and General Framework for Fine-tuning Pre-trained Models

Metaphors are ubiquitous in natural language, and detecting them requires contextual reasoning about whether a semantic incongruence actually exists. Most existing work addresses this problem using pre-trained contextualized models. Despite their success, these models require a large amount of labeled data and are not linguistically-based. In this paper, we proposed a ContrAstive pre-Trained modEl (CATE) for metaphor detection with semi-supervised learning. Our model first uses a pre-trained model to obtain a contextual representation of target words and employs a contrastive objective to promote an increased distance between target words’ literal and metaphorical senses based on linguistic theories. Furthermore, we propose a simple strategy to collect large-scale candidate instances from the general corpus and generalize the model via self-training. Extensive experiments show that CATE achieves better performance against state-of-the-art baselines on several benchmark datasets.

CATE: A Contrastive Pre-trained Model for Metaphor Detection with Semi-supervised Learning

Scripts are structured sequences of events together with the participants, which are extracted from the texts. Script event prediction aims to predict the subsequent event given the historical events in the script. Two kinds of information facilitate this task, namely, the event-level information and the script-level information. At the event level, existing studies view an event as a verb with its participants, while neglecting other useful properties, such as the state of the participants. At the script level, most existing studies only consider a single event sequence corresponding to one common protagonist. In this paper, we propose a Transformer-based model, called MCPredictor, which integrates deep event-level and script-level information for script event prediction. At the event level, MCPredictor utilizes the rich information in the text to obtain more comprehensive event semantic representations. At the script-level, it considers multiple event sequences corresponding to different participants of the subsequent event. The experimental results on the widely-used New York Times corpus demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed model.

Integrating Deep Event-Level and Script-Level Information for Script Event Prediction

Large pre-trained language models for textual data have an unconstrained output space; at each decoding step, they can produce any of 10,000s of sub-word tokens. When fine-tuned to target constrained formal languages like SQL, these models often generate invalid code, rendering it unusable. We propose PICARD (code and trained models available at this https://github.com/ElementAI/picard), a method for constraining auto-regressive decoders of language models through incremental parsing. PICARD helps to find valid output sequences by rejecting inadmissible tokens at each decoding step. On the challenging Spider and CoSQL text-to-SQL translation tasks, we show that PICARD transforms fine-tuned T5 models with passable performance into state-of-the-art solutions.

PICARD: Parsing Incrementally for Constrained Auto-Regressive Decoding from Language Models

In this paper we present the FJWU's system submitted to the biomedical shared task at WMT21. We prepared state-of-the-art multilingual neural machine translation systems for three languages (i.e. German, Spanish and French) with English as target language. Our NMT systems based on Transformer architecture, were trained on combination of in-domain and out-domain parallel corpora developed using Information Retrieval (IR) and domain adaptation techniques.

FJWU participation for the WMT21 Biomedical Translation Task

We obtain new results using referential translation machines (RTMs) with predictions mixed and stacked to obtain a better mixture of experts prediction. Our super learner results improve the results and provide a robust combination model.

RTM Super Learner Results at Quality Estimation Task

This paper describes Huawei Artificial Intelligence Application Research Center's neural machine translation systems and submissions to the WMT21 biomedical translation shared task. Four of the submissions achieve state-of-the-art BLEU scores based on the official-released automatic evaluation results (EN->FR, EN<->IT and ZH->EN). We perform experiments to unveil the practical insights of the involved domain adaptation techniques, including finetuning order, terminology dictionaries, and ensemble decoding. Issues associated with overfitting and under-translation are also discussed.

Huawei AARC's Submissions to the WMT21 Biomedical Translation Task: Domain Adaption from a Practical Perspective

We present our submissions to the WMT21 shared task in Unsupervised and Very Low Resource machine translation between German and Upper Sorbian, German and Lower Sorbian, and Russian and Chuvash. Our low-resource systems (German↔Upper Sorbian, Russian↔Chuvash) are pre-trained on high-resource pairs of related languages. We fine-tune those systems using the available authentic parallel data and improve by iterated back-translation. The unsupervised German↔Lower Sorbian system is initialized by the best Upper Sorbian system and improved by iterated back-translation using monolingual data only.

The LMU Munich Systems for the WMT21 Unsupervised and Very Low-Resource Translation Task

This paper describes the NoahNMT system submitted to the WMT 2021 shared task of Very Low Resource Supervised Machine Translation. The system is a standard Transformer model equipped with our recent technique of dual transfer. It also employs widely used techniques that are known to be helpful for neural machine translation, including iterative back-translation, selected finetuning, and ensemble. The final submission achieves the top BLEU for three translation directions.

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Next from EMNLP 2021

TEMP: Taxonomy Expansion with Dynamic Margin Loss through Taxonomy-Paths

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