Korea, Republic of

Emotion-cause pair extraction (ECPE) is an emerging task in emotion cause analysis, which extracts potential emotion-cause pairs from an emotional document. Most recent studies use end-to-end methods to tackle the ECPE task. However, these methods either suffer from a label sparsity problem or fail to model complicated relations between emotions and causes. Furthermore, they all do not consider explicit semantic information of clauses. To this end, we transform the ECPE task into a document-level machine reading comprehension (MRC) task and propose a Multi-turn MRC framework with Rethink mechanism (MM-R). Our framework can model complicated relations between emotions and causes while avoiding generating the pairing matrix (the leading cause of the label sparsity problem). Besides, the multi-turn structure can fuse explicit semantic information flow between emotions and causes. Extensive experiments on the benchmark emotion cause corpus demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, which outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

COLING 2022

A Multi-turn Machine Reading Comprehension Framework with Rethink Mechanism for Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction

machine reading mechanism

emotion-cause pair extraction

emotion cause analysis

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### 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.

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COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

poster

Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based models have proven effective in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks in recent years. Specifically, in the case of the Extractive Document Summarization (EDS) task, modeling documents under graph structure is able to analyze the complex relations between semantic units (e.g., word-to-word, word-to-sentence, sentence-to-sentence) and enrich valuable information for the sentence representation. However, long-form document summarization using graph-based approaches is still an open research issue. The main challenge is to represent long documents in a graph structure in an effective way. In this regard, this paper proposes a new heterogeneous graph neural network (HeterGNN) model to improve the performance of long document summarization (HeterGraphLongSum). Specifically, the main idea is to add the passage nodes into the heterogeneous graph structure of word and sentence nodes for enriching the final representation of sentences. In this regard, HeterGraphLongSum includes three types of semantic units such as word, sentence, and passage. Experiments on two benchmark datasets for long documents such as Pubmed and Arxiv indicate promising results of the proposed model for the extractive long document summarization problem. Especially, HeterGraphLongSum is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance without relying on any pre-trained language models (e.g., BERT). The source code is available for further exploitation on the Github\footnote{https://github.com/tuananhphan97vn/HeterGraphLongSum}.

HeterGraphLongSum: Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network with Passage Aggregation for Extractive Long Document Summarization

Current works in the generation of personalized dialogue primarily contribute to the agent presenting a consistent personality and driving a more informative response. However, we found that the generated responses from most previous models tend to be self-centered, with little care for the user in the dialogue. Moreover, we consider that human-like conversation is essentially built based on inferring information about the persona of the other party. Motivated by this, we propose a novel personalized dialogue generator by detecting an implicit user persona. Because it is hard to collect a large number of detailed personas for each user, we attempted to model the user's potential persona and its representation from dialogue history, with no external knowledge. The perception and fader variables were conceived using conditional variational inference. The two latent variables simulate the process of people being aware of each other's persona and producing a corresponding expression in conversation. Finally, posterior-discriminated regularization was presented to enhance the training procedure. Empirical studies demonstrate that, compared to state-of-the-art methods, our approach is more concerned with the user's persona and achieves a considerable boost across both automatic metrics and human evaluations.

A Personalized Dialogue Generator with Implicit User Persona Detection

This paper studies event causality identification, which aims at predicting the causality relation for a pair of events in a sentence. Regarding event causality identification as a supervised classification task, most existing methods suffer from the problem of insufficient annotated data. In this paper, we propose a new derivative prompt joint learning model for event causality identification, which leverages potential causal knowledge in the pre-trained language model to tackle the data scarcity problem. Specifically, rather than external data or knowledge augmentation, we derive two relevant prompt tasks from event causality identification to enhance the model’s ability to identify explicit and implicit causality. We evaluate our model on two benchmark datasets and the results show that our model has great advantages over previous methods.

Event Causality Identification via Derivative Prompt Joint Learning

There is a lack of reproducibility in the results of experiments that apply the APPRAISAL taxonomy. APPRAISAL is widely used by linguists to study how people judge things or people. Automating APPRAISAL could be beneficial for use cases such as moderating online comments. Past work on APPRAISAL annotation has been descriptive in nature, and the lack of publicly available data sets hinders the progress of automation. In this work, we are interested in two things; first, we are interested in how well humans can reproduce the annotation of APPRAISAL of the Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA) data set. We employed four annotators, each with a similar cultural and linguistics background to reannotate the data set. Second, we are interested in measuring the performance of the existing automated approaches to APPRAISAL classification. Our results show a poor level of agreement at more detailed \Appraisal categories (Fleiss kappa = 0.059) and a fair level of agreement (kappa = 0.372) at coarse-level categories. We find similar results when using automated approaches that are publicly available. Our empirical evidence suggests that, at present, automating APPRAISAL classification is practical only when considering coarse-level categories of the taxonomy.

Reproducibility and automation of the Appraisal taxonomy

This paper seeks to improve the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems operating on code-switched speech.
Code-switching refers to the alternation of languages within a conversation, a phenomenon that is of increasing importance considering the rapid rise in the number of bilingual speakers in the world. It is particularly challenging for ASR owing to the relative scarcity of code-switching speech and text data, even when the individual languages are themselves well-resourced. This paper proposes to overcome this challenge by applying linguistic theories in order to generate more realistic code-switching text, necessary for language modelling in ASR. Working with English-Spanish code-switching, we find that Equivalence Constraint theory and part-of-speech labelling are particularly helpful for text generation, and bring 2% improvement to ASR performance.

Improving code-switched ASR with linguistic information

We consider few-shot out-of-distribution (OOD) intent detection, a practical and important problem for the development of task-oriented dialogue systems. Despite its importance, this problem is seldom studied in the literature, let alone examined in a systematic way. In this work, we take a closer look at this problem and identify key issues for research. In our pilot study, we reveal the reason why existing OOD intent detection methods are not adequate in dealing with this problem. Based on the observation, we propose a promising approach to tackle this problem based on latent representation generation and self-supervision. Comprehensive experiments on three real-world intent detection benchmark datasets demonstrate the high effectiveness of our proposed approach and its great potential in improving state-of-the-art methods for few-shot OOD intent detection.

A Closer Look at Few-Shot Out-of-Distribution Intent Detection

Existing distantly supervised relation extractors usually rely on noisy data for both model training and evaluation, which may lead to garbage-in-garbage-out systems. To alleviate the problem, we study whether a small clean dataset could help improve the quality of distantly supervised models. We show that besides getting a more convincing evaluation of models, a small clean dataset also helps us to build more robust denoising models. Specifically, we propose a new criterion for clean instance selection based on influence functions. It collects sample-level evidence for recognizing good instances (which is more informative than loss-level evidence). We also propose a teacher-student mechanism for controlling purity of intermediate results when bootstrapping the clean set. The whole approach is modelagnostic and demonstrates strong performances on both denoising real (NYT) and synthetic
noisy datasets.

Few Clean Instances Help Denoising Distant Supervision

We present a new dataset comprising tweets for the novel task of detecting biographically relevant utterances. Biographically relevant utterances are all those utterances that reveal some persistent and non-trivial information about the author of a tweet, e.g. habits, (dis)likes, family status, physical appearance, employment information, health issues etc. Unlike previous research we do not restrict biographical relevance to a small fixed set of pre-defined relations. Next to classification experiments employing state-of-the-art classifiers to establish strong baselines for future work, we carry out a linguistic analysis that compares the predictiveness of various high-level features. We also show that the task is different from established tasks, such as aspectual classification or sentiment analysis.

Biographically Relevant Tweets -- A New Dataset, Linguistic Analysis and Classification Experiments

Semantic parsing (SP) is a core component of modern virtual assistants like Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. While sequence-to-sequence based auto-regressive (AR) approaches are common for conversational SP, recent studies (Shrivastava et al., 2021) employ non-autoregressive (NAR) decoders and reduce inference latency while maintaining competitive parsing quality. However, a major drawback of NAR decoders is the difficulty of generating top-k (i.e., k-best) outputs with approaches such as beam search. To address this challenge, we propose a novel NAR semantic parser that introduces intent conditioning on the decoder. Inspired by the traditional intent and slot tagging parsers, we decouple the top-level intent prediction from the rest of a parse. As the top-level intent largely governs the syntax and semantics of a parse, the intent conditioning allows the model to better control beam search and improves the quality and diversity of top-k outputs. We introduce a hybrid teacher-forcing approach to avoid training and inference mismatch. We evaluate the proposed NAR on conversational SP datasets, TOP & TOPv2. Like the existing NAR models, we maintain the O(1) decoding time complexity while generating more diverse outputs and improving top-3 exact match (EM) by 2.4 points. In comparison with AR models, our model speeds up beam search inference by 6.7 times on CPU with competitive top-k EM.

Improving Top-K Decoding for Non-Autoregressive Semantic Parsing via Intent Conditioning

We present a simple yet effective self-training approach, named as STAD, for low-resource relation extraction. The approach first classifies the auto-annotated instances into two groups: confident instances and uncertain instances, according to the probabilities predicted by a teacher model. In contrast to most previous studies, which mainly only use the confident instances for self-training, we make use of the uncertain instances. To this end, we propose a method to identify ambiguous but useful instances from the uncertain instances and then divide the relations into candidate-label set and negative-label set for each ambiguous instance. Next, we propose a set-negative training method on the negative-label sets for the ambiguous instances and a positive training method for the confident instances. Finally, a joint-training method is proposed to build the final relation extraction system on all data. Experimental results on two widely used datasets SemEval2010 Task-8 and Re-TACRED with low-resource settings demonstrate that this new self-training approach indeed achieves significant and consistent improvements when comparing to several competitive self-training systems.

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HeterGraphLongSum: Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network with Passage Aggregation for Extractive Long Document Summarization

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