Korea, Republic of

Driven by deep learning breakthroughs, natural language generation (NLG) models have been at the center of steady progress in the last few years, with a ubiquitous task influence. However, since our ability to generate human-indistinguishable artificial text lags behind our capacity to assess it, it is paramount to develop and apply even better automatic evaluation metrics. To facilitate researchers to judge the effectiveness of their models broadly, we introduce NLG-Metricverse---an end-to-end open-source library for NLG evaluation based on Python. Our framework provides a living collection of NLG metrics in a unified and easy-to-use environment, supplying tools to efficiently apply, analyze, compare, and visualize them. This includes (i) the extensive support to heterogeneous automatic metrics with n-arity management, (ii) the meta-evaluation upon individual performance, metric-metric and metric-human correlations, (iii) graphical interpretations for helping humans better gain score intuitions, (iv) formal categorization and convenient documentation to accelerate metrics understanding. NLG-Metricverse aims to increase the comparability and replicability of NLG research, hopefully stimulating new contributions in the area.

COLING 2022

NLG-Metricverse: An End-to-End Library for Evaluating Natural Language Generation

meta-evaluation

evaluation metrics

natural language generation

language models

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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.

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!<br><br><br>

To gain access to this event page you are required to register.<br> Find more information and pay the registration fee on event the organizer’s website **[https://coling2022.org/reg](https://coling2022.org/reg)**

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

poster

Multimodal Coreference Resolution (MCR) involves resolving the references across different modalities, which is a crucial capability for building next-generation conversational agents. MCR is challenging as it requires encoding information from different modalities and modeling associations between them. Though significant progress has been made for visual-linguistic tasks such as visual grounding, most of the current works involve single turn utterances and focus on simple coreference resolutions. In this work, we propose an MCR model that resolves coreference made in multi-turn dialogues with scene images. We present GraVL-BERT, a unified MCR framework which combines visual relationships across objects, background scenes, dialogue, and metadata by integrating Graph Neural Networks with VL-BERT. We present results on the SIMMC 2.0 multimodal conversational dataset, achieving the rank-1 on the DSTC-10 SIMMC 2.0 MCR challenge with F1 score 0.783.


GRAVL-BERT: Graphical Visual-Linguistic Representations for Multimodal Coreference Resolution

Recent advances in commonsense reasoning have been fueled by the availability of large-scale human annotated datasets. Manual annotation of such datasets, many of which are based on existing knowledge bases, is expensive and not scalable. Moreover, it is challenging to build augmentation data for commonsense reasoning because the synthetic questions need to adhere to real-world scenarios. Hence, we present GraDA, a graph-generative data augmentation framework to synthesize factual data samples from knowledge graphs for commonsense reasoning datasets. First, we train a graph-to-text model for conditional generation of questions from graph entities and relations. Then, we train a generator with GAN loss to generate distractors for synthetic questions. Our approach improves performance for SocialIQA, CODAH, HellaSwag and CommonsenseQA, and works well for generative tasks like ProtoQA. We show improvement in robustness to semantic adversaries after training with GraDA and provide human evaluation of the quality of synthetic datasets in terms of factuality and answerability. Our work provides evidence and encourages future research into graph-based generative data augmentation.

GraDA: Graph Generative Data Augmentation for Commonsense Reasoning

In this paper, we propose to leverage the unique characteristics of dialogues sharing commonsense knowledge across participants, to resolve the difficulties in summarizing them. We present SICK, a framework that uses commonsense inferences as additional context. Compared to previous work that solely relies on the input dialogue, SICK uses an external knowledge model to generate a rich set of commonsense inferences and selects the most probable one with a similarity-based selection method. Built upon SICK, SICK++ utilizes commonsense as supervision, where the task of generating commonsense inferences is added upon summarizing the dialogue in a multi-task learning setting. Experimental results show that with injected commonsense knowledge, our framework generates more informative and consistent summaries than existing methods.


Mind the Gap! Injecting Commonsense Knowledge for Abstractive Dialogue Summarization

Conversational Task Assistants (CTAs) are conversational agents whose goal is to help humans perform real-world tasks. CTAs can help in exploring available tasks, answering task speciﬁc questions and guiding users through step-by-step instructions. In this work, we present Wizard of Tasks, the ﬁrst corpus of such conversations in two domains: Cooking and Home Improvement. We crowdsourced a total of 549 conversations (18,077 utterances) with an asynchronous Wizard-of-Oz setup, relying on recipes from WholeFoods Market for the cooking domain, and WikiHow articles for the home improvement domain. We present a detailed data analysis and show that the collected data can be a valuable and challenging resource for CTAs in two tasks: Intent Classiﬁcation (IC) and Abstractive Question Answering (AQA). While on IC we acquired a high performing model ( ≥ 85% F1), on AQA the performance is far from being satisfactory (∼27% BertScore-F1), suggesting that more work is needed to solve the task of low-resource AQA.

Wizard of Tasks: A Novel Conversational Dataset for Solving Real-World Tasks in Conversational Settings

The users of endangered languages struggle to thrive in a digitally-mediated world. We have developed an automated method for assessing how well every language recognized by ISO 639 is faring in terms of digital language support. The assessment is based on scraping the names of supported languages from the websites of 143 digital tools selected to represent a full range of ways that digital technology can support languages. The method uses Mokken scale analysis to produce an explainable model for quantifying digital language support and monitoring it on a global scale.

Assessing Digital Language Support on a Global Scale

Text classifiers are applied at scale in the form of one-size-fits-all solutions. Nevertheless, many studies show that classifiers are biased regarding different languages and dialects. When measuring and discovering these biases, some
gaps present themselves and should be addressed. First, “Does language, dialect, and topical content vary across geographical regions?” and secondly “If there are differences across the regions, do they impact model performance?”. We introduce a novel dataset called GeoOLID with more than 14 thousand examples across 15 geographically and demographically diverse cities to address these questions. We perform a comprehensive analysis of geographical-related content and their impact on performance disparities of offensive language detection models. Overall, we find that current models do not generalize across locations. Likewise, we show that while offensive language models produce false positives on African American English, model performance is not correlated with each city’s minority population proportions.

Measuring Geographic Performance Disparities of Offensive Language Classifiers

While pre-trained language models like BERT have achieved impressive results on various natural language processing tasks, deploying them on resource-restricted devices is challenging due to their intensive computational cost and memory footprint. Previous approaches mainly focused on training smaller versions of a BERT model with competitive accuracy under limited computational resources. In this paper, we extend Length Adaptive Transformer and propose to design Token and Head Adaptive Transformer, which can compress and accelerate various BERT-based models via simple fine-tuning. We train a transformer with a progressive token and head pruning scheme, eliminating a large number of redundant tokens and attention heads in the later layers. Then, we conduct a multi-objective evolutionary search with the overall number of floating point operations (FLOPs) as its efficiency constraint to find joint token and head pruning strategies that maximize accuracy and efficiency under various computational budgets. Empirical studies show that a large portion of tokens and attention heads could be pruned while achieving superior performance compared to the baseline BERT-based models and Length Adaptive Transformers in various downstream NLP tasks. MobileBERT trained with our joint token and head pruning scheme achieves a GLUE score of 83.0, which is 1.4 higher than Length Adaptive Transformer and 2.9 higher than the original model.

Token and Head Adaptive Transformers for Efficient Natural Language Processing

Using style-transfer models to reduce offensiveness of social media comments can help foster a more inclusive environment. However, there are no sizable datasets that contain offensive texts and their inoffensive counterparts, and fine-tuning pretrained models with limited labeled data can lead to the loss of original meaning in the style-transferred text. To address this issue, we provide two major contributions. First, we release the first publicly-available, parallel corpus of offensive Reddit comments and their style-transferred counterparts annotated by expert sociolinguists. Then, we introduce the first discourse-aware style-transfer models that can effectively reduce offensiveness in Reddit text while preserving the meaning of the original text. These models are the first to examine inferential links between the comment and the text it is replying to when transferring the style of offensive Reddit text. We propose two different methods of integrating discourse relations with pretrained transformer models and evaluate them on our dataset of offensive comments from Reddit and their inoffensive counterparts. Improvements over the baseline with respect to both automatic metrics and human evaluation indicate that our discourse-aware models are better at preserving meaning in style-transferred text when compared to the state-of-the-art discourse-agnostic models.

APPDIA: A Discourse-aware Transformer-based Style Transfer Model for Offensive Social Media Conversations

While neural approaches to argument mining (AM) have advanced considerably, most of the recent work has been limited to parsing monologues. With an urgent interest in the use of conversational agents for broader societal applications, there is a need to advance the state-of-the-art in argument parsers for dialogues. This enables progress towards more purposeful conversations involving persuasion, debate and deliberation. This paper discusses Dialo-AP, an end-to-end argument parser that constructs argument graphs from dialogues. We formulate AM as dependency parsing of elementary and argumentative discourse units; the system is trained using extensive pre-training and curriculum learning comprising nine diverse corpora. Dialo-AP is capable of generating argument graphs from dialogues by performing all sub-tasks of AM. Compared to existing state-of-the-art baselines, Dialo-AP achieves significant improvements across all tasks, which is further validated through rigorous human evaluation.

Dialo-AP: A Dependency Parsing Based Argument Parser for Dialogues

Health coaching helps patients identify and accomplish lifestyle-related goals, effectively improving the control of chronic diseases and mitigating mental health conditions. However, health coaching is cost-prohibitive due to its highly personalized and labor-intensive nature. In this paper, we propose to build a dialogue system that converses with the patients, helps them create and accomplish specific goals, and can address their emotions with empathy. However, building such a system is challenging since real-world health coaching datasets are limited and empathy is subtle. Thus, we propose a modularized health coaching dialogue system with simplified NLU and NLG frameworks combined with mechanism-conditioned
empathetic response generation. Through automatic and human evaluation, we show that our system generates more empathetic, fluent, and coherent responses and outperforms the state-of-the-art NLU tasks while requiring less annotation. We view our approach as a key step towards building automated and more accessible health coaching systems.

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GRAVL-BERT: Graphical Visual-Linguistic Representations for Multimodal Coreference Resolution

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