Korea, Republic of

Linguists distinguish between novel and conventional metaphor, a distinction which the metaphor detection task in NLP does not take into account. Instead, metaphoricity is formulated as a property of a token in a sentence, regardless of metaphor type. In this paper, we investigate the limitations of treating conventional metaphors in this way, and advocate for an alternative which we name &#39;metaphorical polysemy detection&#39; (MPD). In MPD, only conventional metaphoricity is treated, and it is formulated as a property of word senses in a lexicon. We develop the first MPD model, which learns to identify conventional metaphors in the English WordNet. To train it, we present a novel training procedure that combines metaphor detection with word sense disambiguation (WSD). For evaluation, we manually annotate metaphor in two subsets of WordNet. Our model significantly outperforms a strong baseline based on a state-of-the-art metaphor detection model, attaining an ROC-AUC score of .78 (compared to .65) on one of the sets. Additionally, when paired with a WSD model, our approach outperforms a state-of-the-art metaphor detection model at identifying conventional metaphors in text (.659 F1 compared to .626).


COLING 2022

Metaphorical Polysemy Detection: Conventional Metaphor meets Word Sense Disambiguation

conventional metaphor

conceptual metaphor

polysemy

wordnet

lexical semantics

metaphor

Welcome to the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. 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. 
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EACL 2024

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.

Linguists distinguish between novel and conventional metaphor, a distinction which the metaphor detection task in NLP does not take into account. Instead, metaphoricity is formulated as a property of a token in a sentence, regardless of metaphor type. In this paper, we investigate the limitations of treating conventional metaphors in this way, and advocate for an alternative which we name 'metaphorical polysemy detection' (MPD). In MPD, only conventional metaphoricity is treated, and it is formulated as a property of word senses in a lexicon. We develop the first MPD model, which learns to identify conventional metaphors in the English WordNet. To train it, we present a novel training procedure that combines metaphor detection with word sense disambiguation (WSD). For evaluation, we manually annotate metaphor in two subsets of WordNet. Our model significantly outperforms a strong baseline based on a state-of-the-art metaphor detection model, attaining an ROC-AUC score of .78 (compared to .65) on one of the sets. Additionally, when paired with a WSD model, our approach outperforms a state-of-the-art metaphor detection model at identifying conventional metaphors in text (.659 F1 compared to .626).


technical paper

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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.

The manner in which gender is portrayed in materials used to teach children conveys messages about people’s roles in society. In this paper, we measure the gendered depiction of central domains of social life in 100 years of highly influential children’s books. We make two main contributions: (1) we find that the portrayal of gender in these books reproduces traditional gender norms in society, and (2) we publish StoryWords 1.0, the first word embeddings trained on such a large body of children's literature. We find that, relative to males, females are more likely to be represented in relation to their appearance than in relation to their competence; second, they are more likely to be represented in relation to their role in the family than their role in business. Finally, we find that non-binary or gender-fluid individuals are rarely mentioned. Our analysis advances understanding of the different messages contained in content commonly used to teach children, with immediate applications for practice, policy, and research.

Tales and Tropes: Gender Roles from Word Embeddings in a Century of Children's Books

Document-level Event Causality Identification (DECI) aims to identify event-event causal relations in a document. Existing works usually build an event graph for global reasoning across multiple sentences. However, the edges between events have to be carefully designed through heuristic rules or external tools. In this paper, we propose a novel Event Relational Graph TransfOrmer (ERGO) framework for DECI, to ease the graph construction and im- prove it over the noisy edge issue. Different from conventional event graphs, we define a pair of events as a node and build a complete event relational graph without any prior knowledge or tools. This naturally formulates DECI as a node classification problem, and thus we capture the causation transitivity among event pairs via a graph transformer. Furthermore, we design a criss-cross constraint and an adaptive focal loss for the imbalanced classification, to alleviate the issues of false positives and false negatives. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets show that ERGO greatly outperforms previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods (12.8% F1 gains on average).

ERGO: Event Relational Graph Transformer for Document-level Event Causality Identification

Figures of speech, such as metaphor and irony, are ubiquitous in literature works and colloquial conversations. This poses great challenge for natural language understanding since figures of speech usually deviate from their ostensible meanings to express deeper semantic implications. Previous research lays emphasis on the literary aspect of figures and seldom provide a comprehensive exploration from a view of computational linguistics. In this paper, we first propose the concept of figurative unit, which is the carrier of a figure. Then we select 12 types of figures commonly used in Chinese, and build a Chinese corpus for Contextualized Figure Recognition (ConFiguRe). Different from previous token-level or sentence-level counterparts, ConFiguRe aims at extracting a figurative unit from discourse-level context, and classifying the figurative unit into the right figure type. On ConFiguRe, three tasks, i.e., figure extraction, figure type classification and figure recognition, are designed and the state-of-the-art techniques are utilized to implement the benchmarks. We conduct thorough experiments and show that all three tasks are challenging for existing models, thus requiring further research. Our dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/pku-tangent/ConFiguRe.

ConFiguRe: Exploring Discourse-level Chinese Figures of Speech

Since empathy plays a crucial role in increasing social bonding between people, many studies have designed their own dialogue agents to be empathetic using the well-established method of fine-tuning. However, they do not use prompt-based in-context learning, which has shown powerful performance in various
natural language processing (NLP) tasks, for empathetic dialogue generation. Although several studies have investigated few-shot in-context learning for empathetic dialogue generation, an in-depth analysis of the generation
of empathetic dialogue with in-context learning remains unclear, especially in GPT-
3 (Brown et al., 2020). In this study, we explore whether GPT-3 can generate empathetic dialogues through prompt-based in-context learning
in both zero-shot and few-shot settings. To enhance performance, we propose new
in-context example selection methods, called SITSM and EMOSITSM, that utilize emotion and situational information. We also introduce a new automatic evaluation method, DIFF-EPITOME, which reflects the human tendency to express empathy. From the analysis, we reveal that our DIFF-EPITOME is effective in measuring the degree of human empathy. We show that GPT-3 achieves competitive performance with Blender 90M, a state-of-the-art dialogue generative model, on both automatic and human evaluation. Our code is available at https://github.com/passing2961/EmpGPT-3.

Does GPT-3 Generate Empathetic Dialogues? A Novel In-Context Example Selection Method and Automatic Evaluation Metric for Empathetic Dialogue Generation

This paper is devoted to the extraction of entities and semantic relations between them from scientific texts, where we consider scientific terms as entities. In this paper, we present a dataset that includes annotations for two tasks and develop a system called TERMinator for the study of the influence of language models on term recognition and comparison of different approaches for relation extraction. Experiments show that language models pre-trained on the target language are not always show the best performance. Also adding some heuristic approaches may improve the overall quality of the particular task. The developed tool and the annotated corpus are publicly available at https://github.com/iis-research-team/terminator and may be useful for other researchers.

TERMinator: A system for scientific texts processing

Multilingual pretrained models, while effective on monolingual data, need additional training to work well with code-switched text. In this work, we present a novel idea of training multilingual models with alignment objectives using parallel text so as to explicitly align word representations with the same underlying semantics across languages. Such an explicit alignment step has a positive downstream effect and improves performance on multiple code-switched NLP tasks. We explore two alignment strategies and report improvements of up to 7.32%, 0.76% and 1.9% on Hindi-English Sentiment Analysis, Named Entity Recognition and Question Answering tasks compared to a competitive baseline model.

Aligning Multilingual Embeddings for Improved Code-switched Natural Language Understanding

Hate speech detection has gained increasing attention with the growing prevalence of hateful contents. When a text contains an obvious hate word or expression, it is fairly easy to detect it. However, it is challenging to identify implicit hate speech in nuance or context when there are insufficient lexical cues. Recently, there are several attempts to detect implicit hate speech leveraging pre-trained language models such as BERT and HateBERT. Fine-tuning on an implicit hate speech dataset shows satisfactory performance when evaluated on the test set of the dataset used for training. However, we empirically confirm that the performance drops at least 12.5%p in F1 score when tested on the dataset that is different from the one used for training. We tackle this cross-dataset underperforming problem using contrastive learning. Based on our observation of common underlying implications in various forms of hate posts, we propose a novel contrastive learning method, ImpCon, that pulls an implication and its corresponding posts close in representation space. We evaluate the effectiveness of ImpCon by running cross-dataset evaluation on three implicit hate speech benchmarks. The experimental results on cross-dataset show that ImpCon improves at most 9.10% on BERT, and 8.71% on HateBERT.

Generalizable Implicit Hate Speech Detection using Contrastive Learning

Complex question generation over knowledge bases (KB) aims to generate natural language questions involving multiple KB relations or functional constraints. Existing methods train one encoder-decoder-based model to fit all questions. However, such a one-size-fits-all strategy may not perform well since complex questions exhibit an uneven distribution in many dimensions, such as question types, involved KB relations, and query structures, resulting in insufficient learning for long-tailed
samples under different dimensions. To address this problem, we propose a meta-learning framework for complex question generation. The meta-trained generator can acquire universal and transferable meta-knowledge and quickly adapt to long-tailed samples through a few most related training samples. To retrieve
similar samples for each input query, we design a self-supervised graph retriever to learn distributed representations for samples, and contrastive learning is leveraged to improve the learned representations. We conduct experiments on both WebQuestionsSP and ComplexWebQuestion, and results on long-tailed samples of different dimensions have been significantly improved, which demonstrates the
effectiveness of the proposed framework.


Meta-CQG: A Meta-Learning Framework for Complex Question Generation over Knowledge Bases

This study proposes Semantic-Infused SElective Graph Reasoning (SISER) for fact verification, which newly presents semantic-level graph reasoning and injects its reasoning-enhanced representation into other types of graph-based and sequence-based reasoning methods. SISER combines three reasoning types: 1) semantic-level graph reasoning, which uses a semantic graph from evidence sentences, whose nodes are elements of a triple – <Subject, Verb, Object>, 2) “semantic-infused” sentence-level “selective” graph reasoning, which combine semantic level and sentence-level representations and perform graph reasoning in a selective manner using the node selection mechanism, and 3) sequence reasoning, which concatenates all evidence sentences and performs attention based reasoning. Experiment results on a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERification (FEVER) show that SISER outperforms the previous graph-based approaches and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

SISER: Semantic-Infused Selective Graph Reasoning for Fact Verification

There has been much recent progress in natural language processing, and grammatical error correction (GEC) is no exception. We found that state-of-the-art GEC systems (T5 and GECToR) outperform humans by a wide margin on the CoNLL-2014 test set, a benchmark GEC test corpus, as measured by the standard F0.5 evaluation metric. However, a careful examination of their outputs reveals that there are still classes of errors that they fail to correct. This suggests that creating new test data that more accurately measure the true performance of GEC systems constitutes important future work.

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Tales and Tropes: Gender Roles from Word Embeddings in a Century of Children's Books

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